HARKNESS

I came home and it was five or six months of being lost. I worked night shift at Sack and Save … I had a job on South Farm building fences and things like that. I would go and draw while I was doing that.

After about five or six months of just floating a little bit, a friend of mine who was still in school let me know about an internship at Disney that was happening. This was just before Lion King was about to be released, probably eight months before.

They were ramping up, they had three or four internships a year, 17 people in each internship, and I worked as hard as I could in my portfolio on my own here to just try and improve it as well as I could with everything I had, and send it in. After about two months I found out I got the internship at Disney. That was in the fall of ‘93, so it was just a little over two years after I left here.

With the exception of being with Sony Pictures in California for two years, I've been with Disney ever since. It has been really a great ride.

Q: WHAT KIND OF ART STYLE DO YOU ENJOY MOST?

A: When I figure that out, I'll tell you.

That has always been something — I think it's a lack of patience, maybe. I can't do one thing for too long.

It started off photo-real … My uncle is a photographer in Detroit and I used to copy his photographs. A lot of my art in high school was using his photographs as a base and starting off from there.

Then I got into watercolor and mixed media and all kinds of things. I never could stick with one thing. In fact, in junior year of high school I went to New York City and I interviewed at several different art colleges up there just to see.

I went to one school called Cooper Union … their review of my work was, ‘we

love your work, but we really are looking for people that have a consistent art style.'

I thought … even Picasso was still figuring out his style later in life, and I just couldn't imagine locking it down.

Later on, in my job as an art director, my job now is to be very versatile in art styles, so it paid off. My stubbornness and my lack of patience paid off down the road.

So the “Ballad of Nessie” was a short that I worked on that was in the style of 1930's animation and “Moana” was a much more realistic style. “Prep and Landing” had its own style, and so I find that really fun.

The clay approach, I'm very much in the middle of that and still discovering it. I'm working on another book right now that I think has advanced the technique a little bit, but I think probably in 3 or 4 years I'll be ready for something else.

Q: YOU HAVE SPOKEN ABOUT HOW YOU HAD TO FIGHT TO GET TO POSITIONS WHERE YOU WANTED TO BE. HOW HAS YOUR PERSEVERANCE IN YOUR CAREER HELP YOU GET WHERE YOU ARE?

A: I think as a younger fella in the industry, I always thought that everyone was watching out for me. That they were, ‘This guy is going, he's going to be okay, we'll give him his promotion' and this kind of thing.

Most of the time people are busy doing their thing, they aren't necessarily focused on one artist that just got in the door. At some point, I realized that I can't wait for them to ask me to do this. So I asked my boss, ‘Can I go for this promotion?' and he said ‘Sure.'

I think a big hurdle was getting over the idea that it was personal and getting my ego out of the way and realizing that anybody can have the opportunity if they want to.

In fact, I know that if everyone quit after their first failure I would not be in that job.

A lot of people — and I've been there, too — will struggle with something and fail and say, ‘that's not for me' as opposed to taking the notes and improving and turning around and continuing.

As I have gotten older … I'm getting better and better at that.

Q: WHAT'S YOUR NEXT STEP?

A: I have two more books. I just signed on with a book agency in California, which is great because you can give them an idea and they'll start helping you guide it toward a different publisher and help sell it.

One book I'm working on with my dad. He wrote it from kind of a magical childhood experience that he had. He wrote this story out for his first granddaughter, that's my niece. I found it and it wasn't meant to be shown to anyone other than her, but I'm like, ‘we are going to make this book, Dad. It's so good.'

The writing is beautiful, so I'm waiting for feedback from my agent on that, now.

The other one that is probably a little farther along is one called ‘Wolf Boy' that will be all black and white — a little macabre — and a lot of fun. It's the fun story of a werewolf kid.

Q: ANYTHING TO SAY TO ASPIRING ARTISTS?

A: The biggest thing is to always remember and to really ask yourself before you set off in a career doing it, do you really love it? Does it bring you joy and happiness, and can you imagine yourself doing anything else? Those are the things that are really important to fall back on, just that love for art.

If you're in your career, 20 or 30 years in your career and you have some bad days, to remember that you really just love to draw and it boils down to that.

Remember if things do get tough, and you get rejected and there's ‘no, no, no' before there's a ‘yes,' just bring it back to the basics and keep drawing and keep working on that skill.