This story took place sometime towards the end of the first 'issue' of the KFR webcomic. I was kicking around the idea of attending art school in order to improve my craft. I was very aware of my shortcomings as an artist, plus I had some GI Bill money I wanted to spend. The Savannah College of Art and Design was having an open house for prospective students, and though fully 10 years older than the average attendee, I took the trip.
We wandered around the campus and I felt as old as Father Time. I had gathered up some of my more promising projects, including a stack of KFR Bristol boards, and was toting the whole mess around. Did I mention that I felt old? I had done 6 years in the military, traveled the world, gotten married and had a couple of kids while most of the other potential students could still remember who sat where in their senior English Lit class. Most of the professors were doing, honestly, a horrible job at giving me any sort of feeling that I either could do this, or should do this.
One of the professors told me that I should really go see 'Tom' in the Sequential Art Department. We got directions, and by the time we found the place, the open house was closing up. We caught the very last few minutes of the very last group that Tom was speaking to.
It turns out that 'Tom' was Tom Lyle. Yes, that guy. I had been looking at his art work for years and as the room emptied out and as he started gathering up his stuff to close up shop, he looked at my folder and asked "Can I take a look at that?"
Keep in mind that his shift was over, and that the guy owed me nothing. He's established and accomplished, and I'm an old man with some vaguely defined ambitions. But Tom Lyle gave me almost an hour of his time as he went through page after page of my pathetic offerings. He said nice things, surprisingly nice things. He said that I was light years ahead of most of his students as far as maturity in my writing and my apparent willingness to finish a project.He told me that the kids that come to him are right out of school and have a super-short attention span. He said "They claim they want a job drawing 8 or 10 hours a day, but they complain when I make them draw for the entire class period." He said that most people can either write, or draw, but the fact that I was doing both was very rare. He said "If you come to school here, I can help you a lot. But if you don't, I can only help you a little."
it wasn't all pats on the back. He asked me what sort of tools I was using, and when I told him he chuckled and shook his head. "Ok, here's what you need..." and he gave me a list. He went frame by frame and told me how I could have presented the ideas better. He said "For crying out loud, Michael , go outside and look at what a tree actually looks like before you try to draw one." He talked about how a movie director uses different angles to make the scene more interesting as apparently I had fallen into the habit of drawing a plain horizontal shot. In 45 minutes, he literally changed everything about the way I looked at what I was doing. I really wish I had taken notes.
As we left, the last thing he said to me was "Seriously consider coming to school here. Most of the kids here are coming here on Daddy's money and they have no intention on doing anything with what I teach them. You've got more potential than 99% of the people I teach, but I can't do anything for you if you're not here."
As it turned out, I couldn't justify the time with a houseful of kids and one, sometimes two jobs. I would have had to quit my job and move to Savannah. The comic immediately got better though, and looking back, it's like night and day. I still haven't gone to art school, and I never did spend that GI money, but that one afternoon with Tom , and the kindness he showed me, saved me, I believe years of trial and error. He's a nice guy, and if what I eventually produce is worth looking at, he has to get partial credit for that.
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