Feathers

     All of these little drawings…why?

     Well, as I mentioned in my last post, my animation career has an end date, though nobody (especially me) knows that date exactly. 

     It's like I'm running on a foggy road and somewhere up ahead is the edge of a cliff. This is called (bluntly) "The end of your animation career" or more optimistically, "retirement". 

     I've got a bit of a 401k and maybe there will be a small morsel of Social Security, but my safety net is much flimsier than my grandparents ever was, and I'm probably going to live a lot longer. 

     That's the bad news. 

     The good news is that I love to draw and tell stories, and this is a fortunate thing. Like a lot of skills, it takes decades to develop, but once you've got that skill you get to keep it forever! And it's not physically hard, so…---and pay attention here because this is the crucial point--- You. Can. Do. It. When. You're. Old. 

     And I can figure it out. 

     This isn't extreme entrepreneurship, where I'm trying to invent a whole new billion dollar industry with my amazing breakthrough technology.  

     It's a well worn path where a lot of animation artists have gone (and grown old) before.

1) Bill Peet was a great illustrator and children's book author. But in his younger years he was, of all things, a Disney storyboard artist. 

2) Walt Kelly created the masterpiece comic strip Pogo, but you can see his screen credits on Disney movies like Pinoccio, Fantasia, and Dumbo. 

3) Theodore Seuss Geisel ("Dr. Seuss") never won a single award for his children's books, but he scooped up two oscars by taking a few mid-career detours into animated movies. 

     And on and on. I think you get my point. 

     Sure, the glory days of printing on paper are behind us, but there are new (and quite possibly better) ways to distribute art and ideas out into the world. They just need to be figured out, which is entirely do-able.

     You just need to put in the work.

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     Let's go back to that metaphor of running towards a cliff on a foggy road:

     The classic model of retirement is this:  while you are running toward the edge of that cliff, you are also spending time and money to build yourself an airplane or a hang glider or something (a parachute?) that allows you to avoid hitting the rocks below with a giant "splat". 

   Or sometimes...you can build yourself a pair of wings.