Tools or Skills? Time for a quick vent...

This has always been a pet peeve for me...

The one thing I've noticed a lot here in New Zealand is that animation college graduates that I meet at events have formed the perception that knowing how to operate an advanced software application is the skill that makes them a professional artist.  This isn't just a one-off, it appears to be a trend that is common.

imho, mastering software is more something that makes for an employable artist.  Professionalism is built through experience and practise.  Having both is definitely even better, but in that case you'd probably have been an industry professional for some time.

We should never overlook the fact that software is just a tool.  The skill is in how you understand the art form/technical field and what you can produce with the tools - its like comparing brands of pencil as a way to judge how good a sketch artist someone is.


And not all professional artists master their craft with the same tools.  However once the skills are in place, transitioning between software tools is often extremely easy.

For me personally after almost two decades working with other applications, picking up Autodesk Maya (as complex and intimidating as it first looked) when I found it was an unavoidable necessity for my day job was surprisingly easy to do.  But I didn't have to change anything about the way I modeled, textured or animated - I knew these literally inside-out having done this for so long - I just found the same tools and adapted the approach to match the tools process.


This is the mindset we should be teaching our future artists in colleges - its about mastering the skills, understanding the processes and then being able to apply them in the tools we're provided with.  Too often its the other way around...

That's just my 2c on the matter...