Kobe Muthaf**** Bryant.
Kobe! The anthem for me and every one of my grade school friends. Shooting a wadded-up paper ball into the classroom trash can was a daily ritual.
I remember being in my 2nd year of art school and really struggling to keep up with my peers. It wasn’t that I couldn’t draw or paint. Like most of us, I would get too caught up focusing on the end result, being critical of every stroke I made on the page. Of course, this gets us absolutely nowhere, and it wasn’t until I randomly decided to watch a bunch of Kobe’s highlights on YouTube that I realized Kobe’s approach to basketball could help me.
I needed to take a break from Art School and enroll in part time classes at the Mamba Academy. I had to stop worrying about the end result and just lay down these strokes just like Kobe does with the ball. For him it’s a dance between him, the ball, and the opponent. Shooters shoot & well I just had to draw and live with those results.
In my first life drawing and gestural class, Michael Hampton would always stress “trust your eyes not your brain.” What?! For a while that saying didn’t make any sense to me. Like how can you not trust your brain? It wasn’t until I understood Kobe’s approach to basketball that Hampton’s saying made sense to me.
Hampton was trying to communicate the idea of turning off your brain. To Draw in the moment. Draw what you see because your brain likes to trick you, especially when it comes to perspective, color, and foreshortening.
& that’s when the light bulb clicked on! “ohhh like how Kobe approaches basketball?”
Now at first, like most of us, I hated everything I created. But as time went on I got looser and was just able to draw. Lost in the moment. And low and behold I seemed to create some of my best work.
Another area of impact was during my teen years when I would play a lot of pickup basketball. I shot poorly, always trying to force my shot. But in these moments, when I dug deep, I would get lost in the game and found that I could knock down those late clutch Kobe-esque shots. It was in Kobe’s approach that I learned what it meant to be an artist. He gave me the confidence to trust my own art instincts, don’t get caught up in software’s and tools, and just get lost in the canvas and live with those results.
After my 2nd year of school ended I had 2 big decisions to make. Drop out or get more disciplined. Of course, I went into my 3rd year putting both notions in the rear-view mirror.However, a happy accident occurred. I got really into 3D. Looking back this was the light bulb moment in my life.Everything just clicked and made sense. The decision had been made. Time to get more disciplined & just model.
Modelers model.
I came into art school this rough piece of clay that my art professors had to re sculpt. I’d never drawn people before. All my work was street art related. Whether it was graffiti or mixed media it made absolutely no sense why I was enrolled in animation. I had enrolled in animation because I remembered as a kid telling people I wanted to be a Disney animator and everyone told me that’s never going to happen. The mastery it takes to get to that level is insane. But, like Kobe, if I was going to enroll in art school, why not take the hardest discipline available.
And yes, I am calling out all you artists that went to art school & didn’t enroll in the Animation program. I’m sure you thought the animation majors were weirdos, but let’s be honest, you were stressing about making one poster or drawing, while in animation we were trying to make hundreds of pieces of paper come to life.
That’s my mamba mentality.
However, I will admit, I am a shit animator.
Very shit. *gets off high horse*
But, luckily I found the world of 3D and I’d like to think I can hold my own. It was the first type of art form where “dancing” came so naturally to me. Oppose to drawing or painting where I constantly find myself in a battle.Still to this day I have to fight my mind and trust my instincts, and it’s a fight I’ll never stop fighting.
3D is my basketball.
The way basketball is to Kobe.
It was his mamba mentality that made him one of the people I admired most in this word. I would sit at my computer all night & was able to take those shapes and translate them into anything I wanted. It was so freeing. Once that light bulb clicked I just took off and tried to absorb as much as I could and to this day, my senior work is still shown to students as examples for graduating portfolios.
Whenever I look at my graduating portfolio, I grin at the thought of how many sleepless nights and how hard I had to work to create it. It’s those memories I cherish the most. It was about the grind, me learning to embrace Kobe’s approach. Graduating as one of the top art students in my class was in a way kind of like winning a ring for me, at least the first one along my journey as an artist.
And now here we are almost 10 years later, and I’d like to think I have a few rings now, considering I’ve made an entire career as a 3D artist working for companies like Disney, Fox, CBS, and a multitude of other animation studios.
One thing I always tell my art students is something I learned from Kobe. In one of his interviews, he said “you practice and practice and practice, so that when your number is called you’re ready to go.” Truer words couldn’t be spoken. I remember my first day as a professional artist at CBS Digital, just deer in the headlights, nervous as all hell, but I had to keep telling myself “this is why we practice, so that when my Art Director gives me a project I’m ready to go.” I’d like to think Kobe would have been proud.
Lastly, I’d like to thank all my art professors who taught me different art techniques, chewed me out, & instilled a belief in myself.
But from the bottom of my heart, if it wasn’t for a basketball player named Kobe Bryant, I never would have understood what it means to be an artist.
RIP Kobe Bean Bryant
Rarest of creatures, you truly are an artist.
-Andrew Keo
the barker’s own Chris Ferera & Michael Reza also recorded a Kobe Bryant Memorial episode, Check it out below.
