Armand Baltazar
Changing ways This veteran animation artist-turnedillustrator and writer is busy improving his lifestyle…
“I wake up at six o’clock in the morning. On many occasions I’ll have woken up with an idea and gone pretty much right to the computer – still in my pyjamas – to paint or write down the idea before it’s gone.
However, on other days I have breakfast with my wife and 17-yearold son, and then get to the computer at 6:45am. I take my first break at 11:30am and go back to clean up the kitchen and house, before taking a short walk and making myself lunch.
After lunch, around 12:30pm, I get back to work and take another break around 2:45pm, where I go and work out at my home gym. Usually, I do weight-lifting and calisthenics. For years it was very easy for me to hunker down at my desk and compulsively not move or eat, just paint. But that’s a very sedentary life and it was having a large impact on my physical and mental health.
After contracting COVID, I decided to change my life and I’m currently down by over 100 pounds. My good friend and editor Ben Rosenthal shared the quote: “Hope is a discipline,” by Mariame Kaba. I think of those words daily and strive to live by them as we move forward.
My next break is around five o’clock, when I pick up my son from whatever extracurricular he’s working on, then I come back and try to get as much done by 7pm as possible.
Until my lifestyle change six months ago, I would go back to work all night, but now I spend the rest of the night with my family unless I’m under a major deadline.”
Armand is a Filipino artist from Chicago who’s been living in California since attending Artcenter College of Design. Before leaving to develop Timeless, his own IP, he worked at Disney, Dreamworks and Pixar on projects like The Prince of Egypt, The Princess and the Frog, and Brave. You can see more of Armand’s work at timelessarmandbaltazar.com.