We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Pilar Newton. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Pilar below.

Hi Pilar, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I started off pretty early. my parents discovered that I had the talent to draw as young as 3 or 4 years old. I remember at the age of 3 and a half I drew the first recognizable drawing that I ever did and that was “lady with pocketbook“. I wish I still had a lot of the drawings I did back then. A lot of my archives did not survive several moves. The second recognizable thing I drew when I was probably about four was Santa Claus. Then when I discovered Saturday morning cartoons, it was off to the races. By then I was already enrolled in art lessons with a professional artist at the age of 7 and I knew that art was what I wanted to pursue. But when I discovered Saturday morning cartoons, it was all cartoons all the time and I knew what I wanted to do. Smurfs in particular blew my mind. I said “THAT’S what I want to do”. I started drawing my own Smurf comics and adventures. After a while that wasn’t enough and I started creating my own characters and worlds. I still have most of those drawings and I am so glad that I do. Never throw out your original work you might want to go back and recreate it one of these days!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

A little about myself – I’ve been working in Animation for over 30 years. I really started to hone my craft when I attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts. I believe that building a foundation of fine art really helped me. No matter what field of art you want to go into be it painting, commercial art, fine art, film, architecture, etc… It always helps to build that foundation. I continued to build my art foundation at the Rhode Island School of Design. I started to learn animation, discovering things like shooting animation onto film, Stop Motion, animation, and film festivals! This was also a place where I met probably the first professional animator that I have ever met, the faculty largely being made up of professionals and the visiting artists that would come visit our class.
I got my start after I graduated when I became an intern and then a freelance artist at Stretch Films with the awesome John Dilworth. He was and is an amazing mentor. I got to do in-betweening and assistant animation work on projects such as shorts for Sesame Street and other projects that were awesome to work on. Not long after I started work with John Dilworth’s Stretch on a TV series for Cartoon Network based on his Oscar award nominated short Courage the Cowardly Dog and the Chicken from Outer Space. It was so great being at the forefront of this show. I learned to be a renaissance artist. Something that John stressed a lot: To not just be good at one thing in animation but to be good at all things: animation, design, storyboard, layout, etc…
Something I took with me when I started doing my own work.

Have you ever had to pivot?

By the time I came into the early 2000’s I had been working in and around New York City studios for a while pretty comfortably. I have always been largely traditional, trained to design and animate on paper. Even though studios had long since moved to digitally scanning and coloring drawings, the initial work was done on paper. But little by little I started being asked by studios that I interviewed at if I knew Flash or how good was I at the computer? It made me realize that I had to get with the changing times. I decided that I needed to learn Flash (which is now called Adobe Animate but career-wise most of the people I know including myself still call it Flash) and it was the best thing I have ever done for my career because now I eat, sleep, breath Flash.
I since then I have had a steadily growing client base for my boutique studio.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I don’t know if this is necessarily a lesson that I had to unlearn, but it was definitely a life lesson that I learned. When I was in High school I was taking a children’s book illustration class. For one class my teacher invited a famous children’s book illustrator to give a presentation about their work and look at our work so I was pretty excited. When the day came they gave their presentation and then they came around to each of us to look at our work and give feedback. When they got up to me they picked up my drawing in front of the whole class and said, “Now THIS Is someone who will never make it as a children’s book illustrator because her work is too generic. She will never be a children’s book illustrator.” And they just walked away without a glance at me. I’m the only one in the class they spoke like that too. Now I am one for constructive criticism, but this was so crushing for someone at the age of 16 whose ambition is to be an illustrator/animator. After that I gave up my dream to illustrate children’s books and I became laser-focused on my path to become an animator. Which I eventually did.
And the takeaway is that since then I’ve also illustrated over 20 children’s books. I speak to universities and schools all the time and I always tell them there’s going to be people out there that will put you down. I believe these are tests that the universe put out to see how serious you are in following your dreams. Don’t let haters stop you, stay on your path! I am also a professor now teaching animation, and I give students constructive criticism. I don’t just say “you’ll never make it”. I point out the good things about their work and how to make their work stronger. As an animator that visits schools and an educator, I promised myself to never make anyone feel the way I was made to feel that day. It was definitely a life lesson.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pilartoons.com
• Instagram: @pilartoons
• Facebook: @pilartoons
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pilartoons/
• Twitter: @pilartoons

Image Credits

Artist headshot: Daryl Tillman