Creative Flow

Grandmother Parr entertained me when I was little with stories about her grandmother, Annie Kincaid. Their family migrated from Tennessee to Texas in the 1800s in covered wagons. They experienced hardships, adventures, and encounters with (what she called) "Indians." My favorite story was the one where Annie's mother saved the kids from curious Natives by hiding the little ones in the grandfather clock and tucking a sleeping infant inside the mattress. That day, the neighbor's girl was...

Have you ever wanted to illustrate your story? Not just write it, but make it visual? I'm offering a new training to help you do just that. If you're interested, hit reply with a "yes" and I'll share the details with you. We've been telling stories with art since we figured out how to make marks on cave walls. The way our lives turn out amaze us, and we want to share that amazement. It's why we gossip with friends, write memoirs, and repeat news articles: we want others to mirror our...

I've always loved animals, since I was a kid watching kittens get born. My first word was "kitty." So, of course, I had to draw and paint them. Which isn't easy. I thought I knew what cats looked like until I worked on Disney's Animal Kingdom, where I was designing a whole land of mythical creatures—dragons, unicorns, pegasus horses, sphinxes and phoenixes. That sphinx was tripping me up. I couldn't get the legs right. So, Joe Rohde (the lead designer) suggested I research lion anatomy so I...

Learn to draw portraits! Because so many students have been asking, I created a thorough lesson to help you get really good at drawing heads. It started with a live zoom class...then evolved into a downloadable lesson. More Info There are so many ways to approach drawing a head--it can be overwhelming. What's the right way to do it? How do you get a likeness while filling it with life? What I do differently is I boil it down to 2 main things: structure and values. I distilled my decades...

Have you ever really looked at a painting? I mean, stared at it until you see beyond the surface? I've looked at Rembrandt's The Night Watch many, many times. On the surface, it looks like a scene of a bunch of guys posing—a classic scene of men being heroic. In about 1639, 18 civil soldiers, led by Captain Franz Banninck Cocq (in black), pooled their money to commission their own portrait—unaware that they'd live eternally in one of the most famous paintings in the world. Now squint at it....

35 steps: that's how far it is from the couch to the door of my studio. I never counted them before. Until last Monday. Every morning, I sit in the same spot on our couch. Meditation, tea, prayers with my partner. It's a good start…until I pick up my phone. Then I'm off to the races. News, emails, puzzles, tasks. Time leaks away like money at the casino, and next thing I know, the day is half gone and I'm more behind than ever. It's created a block in my creativity. But last weekend, I had an...

Last week, I gave an informal talk to some friends at the Mary Blair exhibit at Napa Valley Museum of Art in Yountville. I did some deeper research to prepare for the event. All I really knew about Blair was that she'd designed "It's a Small World" at Disneyland—which makes sense because I was an Imagineer, and that was my main lens for a long time. What I discovered gave me so much respect for her as an artist and a woman. I didn't realize what an amazing legacy she'd built. She was one of...

Last night, my friends Dan and Howard took me to a wonderful variety performance in Occidental, the kind of strange and wonderful event that could only occur in West Marin County. It was called the Chautauqua Revue, "a variety show inspired by vaudeville, circus, traditional Chautauquas, and storytelling." The host Wysteria McBrylcream presented everything from a skit depicting star-bellied sneetches to a fifth-generation circus performer juggling and spinning ropes and pins. It was a magical...

In college, I decided I wanted to make a living doing art—as a profession, not a hobby or a side gig. That meant I'd have to produce work either for the art market or for the commercial world. I chose the commercial world. I spent the next few decades designing theme parks, movie props, products, and toys; illustrating books and covers, presentations, and ads; and painting Disney characters in famous artworks (over 200 by now!). This was how learned that artists are laborers. We work with our...