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About Me
Hello, my name is Jordan Groves and I am an artist. Since I was very young and could pick up a pencil I knew that I wanted to be an artist. All through out school I would always be drawing or doodling little characters on the side of my paper margins. As time went on I started to have a growing fascination for animation and seeing my drawings come to life. The sense of satisfaction and joy you get from creating things is just so appealing to me, even at times when I'm faced with technical problems or an approaching deadline I still love what I'm working on. Like most animators I started practicing by using a simple flip book (sticky notes have so many uses) and soon after I got good at this I started to learn things inside Adobe Photoshop and other computer programs through high school. At this point in my life I had started to pick up cameras and have been in love ever since; digital, film, experimental, anything with a lens..I would shoot with it. My skills started to become more refined and I was fortunate enough to be asked to paint a mural on one of the walls at my high school and in my graduating year I was asked to design the student planner. After I graduated high school and took just about every single art course they had to offer in my four years there, a friend of mine had mentioned this great art program for people who have graduated called Beal Art. Beal art was like nothing I had ever seen before and naturally the thought of having art classes all day every day was appealing to me. The program is located in London, Ontario at H.B. Beal Secondary School, it offers a general first year and the option to return to specialize in two specific classes. So I put together a portfolio of my work which got me accepted to the program. In my first year I learned many new things such as life drawing,textiles,ceramics, the fundamentals of animation, photography and videography. The animation offered at Beal is all hand drawn on a light table, then shot on a camera hooked up to a computer with the program Digicel Flip Book. I feel this has benefited me in many ways and that most animators who have never done hand drawn before are seriously missing out. I quickly started to excel at Beal learning how to develop film photos and print them in a darkroom, shooting/editing short films, and becoming the animator I had so badly desired. In my first year I had numerous animations as well as a short film on display in the year end art show. I enjoyed my time so much there I decided to come back another year and specialize in Photography and Animation. At this point my photography had gotten a lot better, I had paying clients outside of school and also I got to learn how to use Adobe Lightroom/how to shoot digitally as well as expanding on the knowledge of film photography. By the end of second year I had learned a lot of new things and techniques, which clearly showed in my work as I had multiple pieces of art in the year end show; animations, textiles, ceramics, and photography. Upon finishing my two years at Beal I felt very confident in looking for post secondary education. Out of all the schools I looked into both researching and visiting, the one that stood out to me was Loyalist College in Belleville. The program sounded great and I decided that it was my number one choice. Shortly after I got a letter back from them offering me a spot in the program so that's where I enrolled and graduated with a diploma. Its a three year program that offers a broad range of classes such as; 2d/3d animation,audio/video,art direction,web design,coding, game design, photogrpahy, composting and more. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there,learned a lot of new things and was able to mix my four passions of drawing,animation,photography and videography. |