Hey Reader,

This time of the year is always a time of rest after the big storm of the end of the vast majority of our students' portfolio season. There are still applications due soon for The Animation Workshop in Denmark, as well as Gobelins in Paris, France, but otherwise, all portfolios have been submitted.

I always spend the "calm after the storm" catching up on my own freelance work — more specifically, a project I've been working on for 3 years for a client is just about wrapping up, and I'm excited to share some of my progress with you soon! It has pushed me to my professional limits, and I learned so much in the process. It was the first time since graduating from Sheridan that I've made so much traditional animation, or "frame-by-frame" animation, and I yet again remember why the skills needed to do it are so numerous.

I look forward to harmonizing much of what I've learned from this project into my future teaching with our next year's cohort of students.

In other news, it is incredibly snowy here on the east coast of Canada right now! I have been enjoying it a lot! Here's a picture of Poppy, our Animation Tutors' unofficial mascot, practically swimming in it:

This has been a year of significant remodeling for us! It has been amazing to share the teaching space with our cross-country and even international instructors. While the bulk of our tutors are Sheridan College alumni or current Sheridan students, we have had Zuzanna and Rafal tutoring from The Animation Workshop (TAW) in Denmark, and Daisy on the west coast of Canada tutoring from Vancouver while attending Emily Carr University.

For the 12 years that I've been taking students through some of the early skills required to become animators, I have done the vast majority of the teaching by myself, or with a previous teaching partner from PortPrep. It has been wonderful to open our doors to many of our past students to return as instructors to share their knowledge throughout our recent programs.

Some Upcoming Classes!

Figure Drawing and Dynamic Character Posing with Garth

Many of our students have taken our pre-recorded class Figure Drawing & Anatomy, but in the theme of restructuring, we are changing up the course content to also apply the figure drawing knowledge to our own imaginative drawings of characters.

Short Summary of Course:

There will be both weekly figure drawing sets, as well as anatomy-specific exercises to focus on throughout the 8 weeks, but we will also be applying the figure drawing knowledge to character design, and we'll discuss how to improve the posing from your figure drawing when bringing it into the world of animation. Inspired by some of the dynamic posing advice given by Walt Stanchfield in his Drawn to Life books.
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​Format: Mixture of video lecture + demonstrations with 4 LIVE 2-Hour sessions throughout the duration of the course (every other week). Live sessions will be in the evening in the western hemisphere — 6pm EDT.

Start Date: Tuesdays beginning March 24th (completed by May 12th)

8-Week Group Course Cost: $500 CAD | ~$360 USD | ~€310 | £266

Make Your First Short Film with Juan

Garth's comment: Juan has studied filmmaking in Cuba, and is now studying Animation at Sheridan College, and has an amazing love for filmmaking. When I first tutored Juan a couple of years ago when he was building his portfolio, we would often spend a good percentage of our sessions just nerding out about filmmaking. Now we have found the proper outlet for this buzzing energy!

Here's his description:

This course will take you through a variety of different creative processes surrounding the creation of a (very) short film, so that you can become better acclimatized to many parts of the animation pipeline — not just isolating one skill alone. Our goal with this class is to teach you to become your own filmmaker, that is comfortable exploring each part of the process from storyboarding, to editing, to making a rough sound effects track, to adding finishing compositing touches in After Effects or Da Vinci.

Short Summary of Course:

By the end of the class, students will have a short film to express their creative vision (which also makes an incredible personal piece for a portfolio).
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​Format: Mixture of video lecture + demonstrations with 4 LIVE 2-Hour sessions throughout the duration of the course (every other week). Live sessions will be in the evening in the western hemisphere — 6pm EDT.

Start Date: Day of week TBD, beginning week of April 13th (completed by ~first week of June)

8-Week Group Course Cost: $500 CAD | ~$360 USD | ~€310 | £266

Designing a World for Your Story with Mahi

Garth's comment: This is the much anticipated course by Mahi that I've told many of our current students about! Mahi is an incredible background painter that I've hired for freelance projects in the past, and I highly recommend her as an instructor.

Here's her description:

We’ll start by discussing creating concept images based on stories, this will be expressed through various worldbuilding exercises, and then we'll go over basic shape and design fundamentals. From there, we’ll move into designing props and a location for your world, and then finish by refining a story moment with a focus on the environment.

Short Summary of Course:

By the end of the class, students will have some design variations, prop designs, isometric explorations of their world, and a final story-focused environment piece.
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​Format: Mixture of video lecture + demonstrations with 4 LIVE 2-Hour sessions throughout the duration of the course (every other week). Live sessions will be in the evening in the western hemisphere — 6pm EDT.

Start Date: Day of week TBD, beginning first week of May (completed by end of June)

8-Week Group Course Cost: $500 CAD | ~$360 USD | ~€310 | £266

We have also had some interest in in-person summer camps. I will send out a Google Form soon to gather some information if this is you.

New Foundations Program Next Year to Help Students Train Earlier

One of the requests we get frequently from parents is that they'd like their teens to get started with rigorous artistic training to better prepare them for their final year of high-school when they're actually working on their application portfolios. While our Complete Animation Portfolio Bundle is the program we recommend for anyone in their final year of high-school, or for anyone who is going to be applying to animation schools this year, many want to get started earlier, perhaps even as early as Grade 9, or "freshman" year in the American school system.

We're redoing our Animation Foundations Bundle beginning next year, which will more closely resemble the structure of our Complete Animation Portfolio Bundle — read: more live sessions! We are shifting our focus from video recorded lectures to live classes with far more person-to-person interaction.

We also want to focus a lot more on student-to-student collaboration and overall comradery. While high-schools don't always offer the best experiences for group work, it is such an important skill to foster for College / University as well as future work as animators. In all of my current freelance animation work, I often pull in others to help in small or large ways, depending on the project. It also makes life as a freelancer a lot less lonely!

The early enrollment for Semester 1 (late Sept - mid - Jan) or for Semester 2 (Feb - late May) is now OPEN

The content of Semester 1 versus Semester 2 is very similar, it is more of a matter of your own preference for taking it in the first half of the school year or the second.

Wait List Available for Complete Animation Portfolio Bundle 2026-2027

We've just wrapped our main program, the Complete Animation Portfolio Bundle and we're still getting many emails from students wishing they'd joined back in September! For anyone that hopes to join us next year, please join our waitlist below to ensure that you get first choice! Like this year, we'll only be giving away a certain number of seats, and 2025-2026 was the first year that we have sold out!

I've shared this snippet before, but I want to share it again for any of our currently enrolled students:

How to get the most out of your sessions with us

Since we've had a large influx of students enroll with us for this portfolio season, I wanted to share some strategies that have worked for some of our past students who've been accepted into the top animation programs:

Book multiple sessions in advance.

It is much easier to give yourself a hard deadline if you book multiple weeks of your one-on-one sessions with us in advance. Don't worry if you need to reschedule them, you can also do so directly from the calendar event in your chosen calendar (Google Calendar or iCal).

Since we're in the portfolio season now, I'm also going to ask all students to book by Sunday at noon if they'd like to have a session in the week to come. This allows me to plan my week more effectively (but this will only apply to myself, Garth, not our other instructors).

Combine your artworks into one or few files

This makes each of our sessions together more effective because then I won't have to spend the first 5-10 minutes of each of our sessions together simply arranging your files. This is described in our Homework Submissions guidelines. Also, please don't submit HEIC files — JPEGs or PNGs are it.

Make notes during the call

While I remember to record 95% of all Zoom calls, occasionally I do not hit record. Either way, it is more effective for your learning to write down notes of changes to make to your artwork or your approach towards your artwork as it comes up in the call, rather than relying on the video-recorded zoom call afterwards. The knowledge will be far more present if you're making your own notes while on the call. It can also help to write up your own summaries after the call to help you internalize the information shared.

Bring more artwork than was asked for

This is another thing that I say year after year — these animation programs have gotten so competitive that you really need to go above and beyond to get accepted. I've even created an additional list of artwork that you can bring to feedback sessions to help "beef up" your homework. Remember that, even if you're enrolled in a specific course, you can always bring any other work on top of what is required for the course. This is why we have 1 hour feedback sessions (for the 30 min review sessions for individual courses, I can only review the required work for those courses), it allows you bring anything else that you're working on for us to provide our feedback on.

Have specifics questions in mind with your homework

Whenever I'm working on artwork for a client or for myself, I find I always generate lots of internal thoughts along the way. Maybe it's just me, but I find my mind is quite busy while drawing or painting. If this is you too, write down any questions you have about the process while you're making your artwork and feel free to ask during our call. Our sessions together are for you! Remember this — you can talk about anything you'd like that you're experiencing along the portfolio-making journey. Examples: "Does this perspective make sense to convey this scene?", "Does my character look like an anti-hero?", "Is this character original enough to stand out?", "How can I make my storyboard more clear?". All great questions!

Lastly, for the full-newsletter-readers, I want to share some personal thoughts I've had after completing this busy season with our students:

1. Solid foundational drawing (and observational) skills are still incredibly important to identify and diagnose a whole range of issues in artwork. I think that whatever changes happen in the industry of animation or illustration, I don't foresee this skill ever becoming irrelevant. When reading through the portfolio guidelines at various animation programs, the overarching message I hear from the instructors who wrote them are: "We want students who can tell stories, and think through their drawings".
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   I think our students often feel pressure to master so many different skills in the process of making their portfolios, but I think that most animation programs still just want to see great character posing, believable yet simplified drapery / clothing, engaging stories that are self-evident — and all of this can be achieved in just a rough sketch is fine. A lot of our students feel pressure to "clean up" their drawings, or render them with colour, but focusing so much on the "finish" of drawings is putting the cart before the horse. Focus instead of developing your drawing skills, and your ability to imagine a variety of different scenes first.
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2. This one I've been thinking about for a while: There are surely tons of effective uses of AI in production, but simply "generating images" is going to be fraught with problems. Having learned to use some 3D animation tools in my work, I see a lot of room to reduce the technical "drudgery" that is manipulating sliders, ensuring checkboxes are checked, and even retopologizing a 3D mesh (which is about ensuring the flow of the geometry of a character makes sense for animation). The fear that AI will replace the entire pipeline, I think, is unlikely simply because of the amount of small decisions that occur at every step of production. Directors love to adjust the final frame, and I doubt that our expectation of the art form will drop so low that people won't begin to see the difference of low-quality work and higher-quality productions.
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   However, let me entirely clear about this — this consideration is entirely separate from the other massive problematic elements of AI-use, namely, the environmental cost (water-use, energy-use, etc.) and whether it will create more problems than it solves, and also if it will ultimately make our work more enjoyable, or more laborious but in a different way. I personally am annoyed by how little the actual experience of doing the tasks of the work is considered in all discussions around AI. Many artists went into this work because they want to be "on the ground" working on creative problems, not a managerial role overseeing robots who do it for them. I have peers that demoted themselves from Art Director positions back to Storyboard Artists or Animators because it created distance from the work they loved doing, despite a higher wage. This isn't always what it's about, especially for many artists (as history has proved!).
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3. The importance of mental health cannot be understated. Despite the news being especially bleak so far in 2026, I wanted to share my personal list of strategies to deal with troubling times. Reach for things that are not fleeting experiences, but long-lasting and personality-correcting — let me explain: So much of what we experience, especially through our devices and all of the distractions they bring; are fleeting, momentary pulls on your attention. Even the way that many shows are created now feel less enduring than some of my favourite films, and I think this is written into the way these productions are made. Instead, get back into reading; especially material that is dense. This act of focusing on difficult work and engaging deeply with it will help you to retrain your focus. Social media does the opposite of this. Another example on a very different end of the spectrum: go to the gym (or hike, or being doing sports)! Making this a consistent practice will increase your stamina, help you focus more, and make you feel a lot better overall. While there are a lot more activities that could be recommended, just reading and exercising are two of my biggest boons for feeling better. They both allow you to practice exerting your will to change things that you can actually control. Rebuild your focus and getting healthier will help you immensely with your artistic practice!

Some Gifts for You

• Not sure what program or what tech to use to draw? Well, we've been hard at work updating and perfecting our website's tools page to include the most useful, well priced software and hardware we can find.
• Also, here is an extensive guide to give you everything you need to know about the Sheridan portfolio! Sheridan Animation Portfolio Guide - The Animation Tutor + BrokenDraw.pdf​

That's all for now folks!

As always, if you have anything you'd like to ask about in this newsletter, don't hesitate to reply — take care everyone!

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Cheers,