When I was in art school I had a mentor named Tsukasa. He was about 10 years older then me, grew up on 90's hiphop lived in Brooklyn and was from Tokyo Japan. I was very drawn to the man for several reasons. His artistic voice and abilities as a draft men and animator where some of the best I'ed ever seen. His key poses where something unlike anything I’ed seen. They contained so much movement and power, I would study his drawing in awe.

Unfortunately while he was working on his final project the Tsunami hit Japan and he ended up leaving to help his fellow country men rebuild forcing him to pause his thesis project. Before this occurrence I was helping him with his project. I would clean up some of his scenes and scan them, preparing them for compositing. He was an upper classmate and as tradition goes they usually enlist the under classmates to help. After his return I was knee deep in my own thesis and didn’t have much time to help him, I tired my best but as is usually the case with thesis projects it was a huge undertaking and he just didn’t have enough time to polish his.

However he did manage to complete the majority of his rough animation and a few cleaned up scene. Long story short I ended up storing a few boxes of his during one of his moves. These boxes contained his thesis drawing, I have recently re discovered them after about a decade in my basement closet. There is a lot of animation and the majority is beautiful worth studying and sharing.

So this lead me to the purpose of this post, within the coming weeks I will be re scanning some of his drawing. I will try and composite some of the scene’s and I will share them on this site. I don’t know exactly how long that will take, I am knee deep with my own animation project so it will be an on going restoration project, but believe me when I say it will be worth it. I also don’t know the timing of his scene so I will be using my judgement and opinion when the time comes.

Final note about mentors, I have had two mentors since my journey as an animator started in 2007. Both have influenced me in different ways, I have fallen out of contact with both but I still feel like I will carry their teachings with me for the rest of my years. Do you have a mentor story? How have they helped you grow?

These are some key poses from the project. As you can tell…AMAZING!!