Oona Holtane: Artist, Animator, Authentic
by Jessica Comstock
Since childhood, Oona Holtane has been connected to animation. “Something about moving pictures that were hand drawn were just something that moved my mind,” said Holtane.
Art has been a part of her life since childhood. Both her parents are artists, so growing up she was encouraged to let her creativity run wild, allowing her to make messes with finger paint for the sake of creative freedom.
“As corny as it sounds, I wouldn’t be doing what I do now if it wasn’t for that. I feel like it’s important to have creative like expression as a child because then it allows you to be more confident with it later on,” said Holtane.
Holtane’s style has taken twists and turns. In school, she was told to be clean and precise, but clean and precise is not who Holtane is or wants to be.
“I decided to take a rebellious stance on that and I wanted to just do what I like to do. Instead of drawing clean lines, clean everything, I started doing things for myself,” said Holtane. “And I had more fun doing it.”
Her current style, as she calls “an expression of [her] mind on paper,” screams of bright color and excitement. Characters of hers are sketched and traditionally imperfect, but full of life, emotion and authenticity.
“Her characters are very expressive, dynamic and colorful, and there’s a clear sense of action in the poses she creates for them” said Luna Miranda, an artist who has followed Oona’s work for months.
“You can definitely tell there’s a soul and hard work behind each character. That’s something I’m striving to achieve myself,” said Miranda.
But, despite Holtane’s love of all things creative, growing up in a small town where it seemed as though everyone around her was math and science orientated turned her focus away from art for many years. It wasn’t until halfway through high school that she put aside the idea of becoming a computer scientist and returned to her passion of art.
Holtane pursued freelancing and sharing her art online, specifically on her Instagram account, oona_who, which has gained over forty thousand followers. At the sound of those numbers, Holtane slightly cringes.
“I think it has helped [given me more opportunities]. There’s more exposure; people get to know who you are. It’s just very important now in the art industry to have a following. But it’s not really all about the numbers, it’s about how much you put yourself out there and how much you’re willing to risk,” said Holtane.
While at school at Northern Illinois University studying illustration, Holtane’s view of artistic opportunities expanded. As she watched other designers create entire characters from a blank sheet of paper, she realized that the road of character design and development, and later animation, was what she had wanted to do all along.
Her sophomore year of college, she applied to Walt Disney Animation Studios as a Visual Developer, and, along with 25 other studio job applications that year, was rejected.
“Being rejected to absolutely everything I applied to that year was hard. But I’ve learned that persistence and hard work and just kind of believing in yourself really takes you farther than you know,” said Holtane.
What she didn’t know at the time of rejection was that she was denied because Disney was just waiting on her. Holtane said most people who apply for the internship are master’s students or students who originally studied engineering and in their second cycle of school; she was extremely young in comparison.
Just a year later she applied again and was accepted for the summer internship at Walt Disney’s Animation Studios. She says her experience working with the design team inside the walls of Disney can be described as one word: surreal.
“As a kid, like, you look at these movies and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, I want to do that.’ And then you’re there. And you see people doing it. You see Disney veterans just working and chatting at lunch or eating a bagel. It’s just insane,” said Holtane.
During the internship, she was able to combine the creative, artistic side of animation with the technical, something she was discouraged to do in her classes at school. At school, she was restricted to the artistic side and was told that improving her technical ability was not important, but she knew that she could grow further.
“I have a lot of self-doubt when it comes to my skills and my career, but meeting these people who were both encouraging and brutally honest was life changing,” said Holtane.
In her life post-Disney, Holtane said she has many different interests, but wants to focus and implement them all into animation. She currently works for Illumination Mac Guff, a French feature animation company that has produced movies such as Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax and Despicable Me 2 and 3.
