The Art of Joshua Cotton: May 2012

Howdy blogfolk! Wow, it's been a crazy couple of weeks! I apologize for not posting for a while, school has been a beast– but a very cool one. ie a Rancor or a Banshee from Avatar, maybe even a duck :) I've been sketching a lot, to the tune of four sketchbooks in the month since my last post, so I'll be posting some updates soon ;) I've been taking Ryan Woodward's gesture drawing class, which is more like a 6-week intensive on living creatively; Ryan has always been one of my heroes, and I'm having a blast in the course. Okeedoke, enough excusery, time for a post! This was my story pitch for a comic I'm doing for an anthology project this summer, with a bunch of other animation/ illustration students/alumni at BYU. The official page can be found here: (Reality Not Included).

ok, here goes!:

Toby, a young autistic teenager, is desperate for acceptance but awkward and alienated from his peers by an irrepressibly active imagination. Playing to his desire to "fit in", two football players lure him into a practical joke. Little do they know that they've bitten off more than they can chew :)

"Night Vision" originated, oddly enough, when I was in elementary school. As a 9-year-old I drew a series of high-schooler character designs to populate the world of an unknown story. A few weeks ago I came across the drawings again, and as I flipped through reminiscing, one in particular caught my eye. It was Sam (now "Toby")- the boy at far left. The rest of the characters might easily be dismissed as your run-of the mill high-school stereotypes, but he was different. He was striking, and confusing. What was a high-schooler doing wearing an orange cape and goggles strapped to his face? In my 9-year-old mind the answer was obvious: that's what cool people do. Today I still tend to agree, but I wondered what caused him to so brazenly defy social norms. Then it occurred to me. I remembered a close friend growing up, who was autistic. He appeared just like everyone else when we were younger, but as we grew up he seemed more and more different. In reality, I think, the rest of us were the ones that changed. To varying degrees we became cynical and pessimistic, callous, and allowed fear of what others thought to change the way we behaved on the outside. Not my friend. He remained fearless, true to himself no matter who laughed or what people said. Most of all, his incredible optimism and imagination shone through in everything he did. In retrospect, autism wasn't so much his disability, it was his superpower. And that's what this story is about- re-thinking disability.

Here are the original sketches: