Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sofia Tonin. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Sofia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

I recently started at a commercial studio in Minneapolis as a CG Generalist Intern and have been living in a big city for the first time. Every day when I walk to work or leave the studio for a lunch break I see dozens of people wearing collared formal shirts, some in a suit and tie, some slightly less formal. And every time I see them I’m reminded how different their work experiences must be. I’ve worked in more professional and business-like places before and very vividly remember the formal and strict atmosphere that surrounded the environment. While there certainly were good parts about those jobs, personally, it’s nothing compared to the joy I’ve already experienced in my short time working in the creative industry.

The people I’m fortunate enough to work with at the studio are so effortlessly inspiring and easy to talk to or bounce ideas off of. It breathes life into me even if it’s an exhausting day of revising notes and getting stuck on problems for hours. I talk to a random person and I feel rejuvenated. It is an office full of people who are there because they want to be and love what they do. People don’t enter the creative industry because it’s extremely lucrative or because it’s what’s expected of them. Quite the opposite actually; you have to be so in love with what you do that you’re willing to chase after it even though the industry might be unstable or you may never earn as much money as you would by going into finance. So every person that I meet in this industry is only here because they WANT to be. There is a passion and enthusiasm that I sometimes feel I’ve only ever found or seen in the creative industries and it makes me feel so incredibly honored and humbled to be a part of it.

Sofia, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Sofia Tonin and I’m a 3D character animator and CG Generalist. I was born in Italy and moved to America when I was 6 years old. I moved around a few more times since, moving to Germany and living there for 5 years while I was in middle school and moving back to the states for high school. It shaped my personality a lot, the moving around, and I think the constant change made me turn to art and cherish it as a stability and comfort in my life. I’ve always had a passion for art and technology. In fact the two co-existed in my life for as long as I can remember. I loved to draw, but I also loved math and science. I think in large part this is because at my core I’ve always loved problem solving. In the same way that I nowadays get lost in trying to perfect an animation or figure out how to rig a character, back then I used to spend hours on a hard physics problem and always found a sense of comfort and safety simply in the act of methodically working my way towards a solution. Thankfully in high school I discovered my two main interests could co-exist and work together in the computer animation industry. Both my technical and artistic sides found their harmony in this field and I’ve never wanted to do anything else since.

I’ve been studying computer animation at Ringling College of Art and Design for the last three years and as I go into my last year at this school I can’t wait to get started on my thesis. I’m going to be creating a 3D animated short film from scratch and showcasing all I have been learning over the last few years. I primarily specialize in character animation, as that is where my passion lies. I love bringing characters to life and giving them a personality and above all making whoever watches it laugh. Outside of character animation I also model, texture and rig all of the props and sets that go into making the shorts I’ve created over the last few years. It’s been an incredible experience and I’m extremely grateful Ringling has taught me all parts of the pipeline. It has allowed me to consider myself truly a generalist in the field of 3d animation and has helped me get the internship I am doing this summer. The company I’m working at has so far asked me to model, rig, texture and animate as needed for ongoing projects and I love the diversity of the things I do there. It ensures there will never be a dull day on the job!

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

I think sometimes, as an artist doing what you love everyday, it’s easy to forget your time and effort are extremely valuable. At least personally, I’ve often found myself doing work for free or feeling bad about taking money for my artwork because I was enjoying it, or I thought it wasn’t very good, or the person who’d asked me to do something for them was a friend of a friend and I didn’t want to make things awkward. The biggest lesson I’ve had to learn is that whether you enjoy the process or not, whether you think the final result could have been better or isn’t exactly what you envisioned, it is still something that you made and is worthy of compensation. Of course it’s really nice to be able to just make a funny illustration for a friend’s birthday, or as a gift every once in a while, but I’ve always found in the creative industry it’s easy to fall into the mindset of feeling like you don’t have a right to charge people for the products you make, even if they commission you or ask you in a professional context.

I’m so grateful to the older artists around me who, as I grew up and entered the industry, really drilled into my head “do NOT work for free, your time and effort have value”. It seems obvious, but as an artist it can be really hard to really believe that at first. In that sense I think the best thing we as artists can do to support each other is remind younger artists (or even older ones ;)) that just because our jobs don’t involve numbers or spreadsheets doesn’t mean the end product isn’t just as valuable.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

I’d like to broaden this question a little and talk about resources and most importantly reference in general. I think one of the biggest issues I had starting out in my creative journey was not understanding the true value of reference. Personally I always found spending an hour on Pinterest before designing or modeling something to be extremely boring. I always wanted to just jump in and make something and even though I always thought I knew exactly what I wanted to do in my head, it never ended up looking right. It took me until perhaps my senior year in high school and especially my freshman year of college to realize that I was making a colossal mistake. I used to just pick random pictures that somewhat fit what I wanted and then jump into the project without ever looking at the reference again. I’m still guilty of that at times, but I’ve gotten a lot better at really researching and studying something before I take action. I’ve found it helpful to find an artwork you really admire or a style of rendering that captivates you and ask yourself a bunch of questions. “why do I like it?” “how is it rendered?” “do they use line art and if not how do the shadows and darks show form anyway?” “how are shapes stylized and why do they look so appealing?” I truly believe for me the biggest thing that changed in my attitude towards reference was just the amount of time and effort I allotted to that stage of the creative process. It’s almost like I learned to have faith in the results that reference would get me if I gave myself the time to really deep dive into the hunt for inspiration and research.

Growing up I also always heard the famous “you have to draw from life” and “you have to draw the human figure from life”. It always frustrated me because frankly, a) I didn’t like doing either of those things and b) I genuinely didn’t see the value in them. I couldn’t understand how knowing how to draw a realistic human body could help me design a cartoon character or how it would help me animate them in 3d. It’s only after I was forced to draw from life extensively in college that I understood why older adults always preach it. It teaches you how to see, more than just how to draw. It trains your eye to see how light and shadow, form and contrast work, and how at the end of the day everything we see really is just light and dark in varying degrees of saturation. It’s about learning how to translate a physical tangible object onto a flat plane of color. Learning to see the world that way makes everything make sense, and gives you a confidence that translates into any kind of art you make; realistic or not.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://sofiatonin.wixsite.com/portfolio
• Instagram: sofiatonin_art
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sofia-tonin/
• Other: Recently I submitted an entry on the rookies website and broke down a bunch of my work and how I created my most recent animation projects! If you’d like to check it out and see a bunch of behind the scenes content for those things you can find it at: https://www.therookies.co/entries/28462