Allan Hancock College student Kaden Howard has been using the same tablet, a Wacom Intuos 3, to draw cartoons and character sketches for the past nine years.
“It’s a little baby tablet,” Howard told the Sun in a recent interview.
Now, thanks to a $1,500 first-place visual arts grant from the Santa Maria Arts Council, the budding artist will get to upgrade to what he calls “industry-level equipment”: a Wacom Cintiq.
“It’s bigger, there’s more drawing room, and more pressure sensitivity, and you can draw directly on the screen,” Howard said of the high-tech device.
The 21-year-old said he’s been drawing “since I could hold a pencil.”
“I’ve always loved drawing, which is something I think anyone could say, but I stuck with it,” he said, adding that he found inspiration in the various movies and videogames he watched and played as a child.
One of his all-time favorites, like many children of the late ’80s and early ’90s, was Disney’s The Little Mermaid. But perhaps unlike most kids, Howard cultivated that love of fairytales into a passion for animation and visual design.
Disney films and characters like Glen Keane’s beloved redhead, Ariel, he said, “made up a lot of people’s childhoods.”
Now Howard wants to be one of the artists “raising a generation and telling the stories we want to tell,” he said.
The grant from the Santa Maria Arts Council is a big step in the right direction.
Howard, however, is just one of 11 artists to receive an award this year. The council will disburse $10,000 to first- and second-place winners in four categories, including dance, drama, music, and visual arts, and three additional $1,000 grants will be awarded on behalf of the Ian M. Hassett Memorial Fund, the Los Padres Artists Guild, and the newly established Nat Fast Memorial Grant.
This year’s Individual Grants in the Arts Honoree is artist, educator, and arts advocate Marti Fast, who also serves as curator at the Ann Foxworthy Gallery and is co-chair of the Santa Maria Arts Council Grants Committee.
“I’m just blown away that they picked me,” Marti told the Sun. “Apparently, it was in the works before dad [Nat Fast] passed. It’s a way of truly passing the torch in my family and in the arts community.
“My dad would have to smile because even though he isn’t here top enjoy it, it would really make him happy,” she added.
She said while her father was a visual artist, he greatly valued music and performing arts, so she and her family decided to make his memorial grant reflect that.
Ian M. Hassett was a student in Marti’s life-drawing class who died from lymphoma in 2012. To honor their son, Hassett’s parents created a visual arts grant in his name this year.
Marti said two new grants “added a whole new layer” to the council’s program.
“One was a man who was just coming into his own and the other, my dad, dedicated his whole life to the arts,” she said.
All of the grant recipients—Howard, Chavela Matais-Lopez, Jen Cameron, Sierra Wells, Robby Wagner, Allyson Hankins, Aniel Ha, Jose Antonio Cossio, Rachel Shedd, Brenna McNamara, and Mimi Stange—will be honored at a volunteer-run grants showcase on May 19 at the Abel Maldonado Community Youth Center.
Contact Managing Editor Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Apr 24 – May 1, 2014.