Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535742
When he's not working in animation as a Production Designer, you can find Tom Pajdlhauser sketching ink and watercolor scenes of Los Angeles. The artist is a recent transplant to L.A., having moved there from Canada in 2023. By any measure, he keeps himself very busy. He is also the co- owner of Birling skateboard shop and café in his hometown of Ottawa. In fact, it was skateboarding in the late '90s that led him to animation. "To put it simply, I grew up skateboarding, and that was my gateway into the arts," he says. As a kid, Pajdlhauser loved looking at the different artwork and designs on the bottom of skateboards. He and his parents had migrated to Canada from the former Czechoslovakia in 1989, just before the Soviet occupation ended. Pajdlhauser and his friends were poor growing up, and SKETCH APPEAL PRODUCTION DESIGNER TOM PAJDLHAUSER USES SKETCHING AS HIS LENS TO VIEW THE WORLD he discovered skateboarding had a low barrier to entry, unlike sports such as hockey. By his teenage years he'd met some older guys who were both skateboard graphic artists and animators. Pajdlhauser thought that was the coolest thing, and he went on to study traditional animation at university in Ottawa. While the majority of his time off the job goes into growing the skateboard shop, sketching is something he does to relax. He's drawn to "the complexity and chaos of very lived-in urban spaces," he says. He appreciates the challenge of being immersed in a busy street corner and finding ways to document and simplify that. "My personal art is heavily connected to my sketchbooks. I love going to different cities and just immersing myself in those places and sketching as much as possible." Pajdlhauser travels to destinations that have interesting architecture, landscapes, and colors, and he's visited India, Vietnam, and Istanbul specifically for their sketch appeal. He finds he's at peace when he's in a new place, without a cell phone or the distractions of day-to-day life, A F T E R H O U R S 16 KEYFRAME