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Welcome to American Heritage School's Patriot Podcast, hosted by the students of the podcast class at the AHS campus in downtown Salt Lake City. Each episode features students interviewing professionals, experts, and inspiring guests to explore real-world experiences through the lens of The Seven Principles of Personal and Civil Liberty. These conversations are designed to uplift, educate, and spark meaningful dialogue within the family.
Tune in with your family each week to learn together, reflect on the values that matter most, and be inspired to live with greater purpose and principle.
Learn more about The Seven Principles of Personal and Civil Liberty here: https://slc.americanheritageschool.org/the-seven-principles
Greetings from American Heritage School in Salt Lake City, Utah.
David Dibble:This is the Patriot Podcast.
Sandy:Where we, the students, interview people from all walks of life.
Charlotte:Together Together. Together, we'll talk about future careers
Sandy:Timeless truths
Charlotte:and unique experiences.
Sandy:So settle in.
David Dibble:So settle in.
Charlotte:So settle in, and let's begin. Hi. I'm Charlotte. Welcome to the American Heritage School Patriot Podcast.
Sandy:I'm Sandy, and today we are privileged to get to talk with mister David Dibble.
Charlotte:Mr. Dibble was raised on a farm in Davis County, Utah, where he was influenced by the landscape from an early age. Formal art education was followed by six years as a color artist for Blue Sky Studios of twentieth Century Fox and six years teaching illustration at Brigham Young University.
Sandy:David and his family now reside in Orem, Utah, where he paints full time, seeking a divine connection with the land. His work brings awareness to the beauty and nobility of agriculture. He also continues to offer his expertise to animation studios worldwide.
Charlotte:Mister Dibble, will you tell us what your path was like becoming an artist?
David Dibble:Thank you. Sandy and Charlotte, it's good to be here with you. Thanks for letting me come. So I don't know if there's any single path for an artist. It seems like there aren't a lot of handbooks, right, to say, you go to school and you do this thing and then you can be an artist for an art company.
David Dibble:It really is pretty circuitous in how it is for every person. My personal journey was such that I went to college for a lot of years, but even before then, when I was your age, I was drawing and painting all the time. I would come home from school and get into my desk and start drawing. So I just was always doing it. It was always a part of me.
David Dibble:And then I actually did ten years of college art training between college and overseas education and graduate school, and then was in the animation industry, you mentioned, for a time before. I was teaching full time and then was adjuncting before that, then left teaching in academia to paint full time.
Charlotte:Very cool. Where did you go to college?
David Dibble:I did a year in Italy at a school in Venice, and then I did two years at Weber State University in art. Then I was three years at Brigham Young University for my undergraduate to finish up. And then I was four years at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
Sandy:Wow. What would you say is your favorite thing to draw?
David Dibble:Oh boy, I love drawing the landscape of trees and rocks and structures, specifically agricultural things. I mean, sounds kind of on the nose because that's what I paint a lot, but that's why I paint it, because I really enjoy those spaces. And I love kind of the organized chaos of how farms happen. And specifically, I love drawing and painting the historical blend that happens over time, that somebody's grandpa built part of the barn, and then that blew down, and then the dad did this part, and then the brother did this part. It really is kind of like genealogy physically represented in a space, which is really cool.
Charlotte:Yeah, I love that. That's awesome. Going back to your college education, how come you went to so many different colleges?
David Dibble:Maybe it just took me a long time to get it right. Don't know. I think art training is one of those things that you don't just learn and then you're good. It's not like, Oh, well, I learned how to use a hammer and put up a frame house, and then I have that skill. It is a lifelong training, and it just takes a long time to get good at it.
David Dibble:The good thing about what is happening in the world right now with so many online options is that there's YouTube videos and personal mentorships and online classes that are making knowledge available artistically that just never has been in the history of the world. So there's not just one right way to get an art education, though in the past it was a little more narrow of where you could go to get that information.
Charlotte:Yeah. For sure. Constant learning. What would you
Sandy:say was your favorite movie to draw for?
David Dibble:Oh, when I was in animation?
Charlotte:Mhmm.
David Dibble:I think your first one is always kinda special, and for me that was Rio, the movie.
Charlotte:Oh, fun.
David Dibble:And then Rio two was after that. So, yeah, when I was there, worked on Rio one, and then Rio two, and Peanuts, and Epic is the name of the film. It was originally called Leafman. On Disney plus now.
Sandy:I've seen that. Yeah.
David Dibble:It came out the same weekend as Captain America, and everyone went to see Captain America, they didn't go to see our movie, even though it's really actually a pretty good movie. And then, Ferdinand as well. But I think Rio was special to me just because I had served as an LDS missionary in Brazil, so it was really sweet to go back and visit that place again visually and learn the animation world for the first time. Was really cool.
Charlotte:For sure. Yeah, that sounds fun.
Sandy:At American Heritage School, we try to live by the principles of personal and civil liberty. Which of these principles has most guided your career path? And will you share a personal experience showing how this principle has helped you?
David Dibble:Yeah, thank you for asking. So many of those principles are wonderful, and as I was looking through them thinking about how that's guided me, I could probably give a story about each one. But one that came to mind was the idea of family centric choices. And within art, whether it's any of the applied arts, art or music or any career, it's a very self guided journey. It's easy to think I have to leave my family to go do this thing during the day, then I can come back to them at night.
David Dibble:And the more you get into your career, the more it feels like, well, do I need to choose between my family and my career? Because art will take whatever you'll give it. It's a mouth that never is full. If you let it, it will take over your life. I feel like God gave me a gift of curiosity and creativity.
David Dibble:And to make it work, he kind of had to put the key in the ignition and break it off and just say, okay. This is gonna be running all the time, just so you know. So you're gonna have to figure out when to give it space and when to temper that with other things, because it'll drive you crazy if you let it go all the time. As I was getting into the film industry, as we were having children, I was a little nervous that I wouldn't be able to continue to progress artistically like I wanted to. I was trying to paint for gallery paintings at night and on weekends and fitted in wherever I could.
David Dibble:And then we had our first child, and I thought, oh, man. Like, A, I'm tired all the time. B, my wife is tired all the time. And I can't come home from working on movies all day and then say, honey, thank you for taking care of our child. Now I'm gonna go into the studio for another five hours.
David Dibble:Right? I just couldn't do that and stay married. And I wanted to be with my family. So I thought, okay, I've got to figure something else out here. As I thought about it and prayed about it a lot, I thought, okay, I need to shorten down my painting time at night and weekends.
David Dibble:But what I do want to do is do more plein air painting, and that's painting outside from life. Right? Rather than being in the studio painting from photos and laboring over that, I'm gonna paint from life, I'm gonna take in a longer lunch. And so religiously, every week, Wednesday at 12:00, I went out and I painted for two hours. And it wasn't as much time on paper as I had been painting before, but it was concerted time and it was repetition of painting from life.
David Dibble:And I actually got a lot better within a much shorter period of time than I had been with much more time painting in the studio. So it was a reminder to me that as I put my family first, as I focused on that as a divine attribute, that Heavenly Father helped other things happen in a way that I couldn't have done alone.
Charlotte:I love that. That's awesome. So when you were an animator, what is your daily life like in the job? What do you do? Is it demanding?
Charlotte:Tell us about it.
David Dibble:Yeah. Just living life with celebrity. People just clap for you as you walk down the street all the time. I'm just kidding. No.
David Dibble:And it's important to remember within an animation company, we call it animation, but there's so many different jobs. Right? Animator is a very specific job within a large pipeline of making a movie. Thinking about it like building a house or a building, you have a couple people that design the house, like an architect and an engineer and interior designer, right? And then you have a lot of people that make that house.
David Dibble:The framers and the contractor helps it, but the drywall people and the concrete people and the roofers. The same is true in a movie, where you have a few people that design the movie, and you have a lot of people that make the movie. Animators are part of the crew that makes the movie. They're kind of like the puppeteers that make the things move. But somebody has to design all those puppets.
David Dibble:Somebody has to put a skeleton in that puppet. Somebody needs to design the room or the space where that puppet is going to move. So I was a color artist, and I was part of that initial design team. And I would do paintings, as I was trained to do, that would give kind of like a coloring book context for the characters and a stage, in essence, that they could act on. And to your point about every day, I would go as usually there from nine to six at night, sometimes during the crunch time of a movie when you're trying to get it done.
David Dibble:I would work till eight or ten or eleven even. So they're long days. You're sitting usually in a cubicle because most animation is digital now. So we were digitally painting, and we'd have to have the blinds drawn so that you could see the color accurately on your screen. So you were mostly sitting down at a dark cubicle all day.
David Dibble:Oh, wow. Which could be hard sometimes, which is why I needed to go out and paint at lunchtime. I'm like, I need some nature and some light. And it was hard in the winter sometimes, when you drive in and it was dark in the morning, and then you would leave and it was dark and you were in a dark room. But having said that, it was really awesome to work with amazing artists all around you.
David Dibble:That if you were having trouble with a painting, you could call in your friend who was an amazing artist and say, How would you fix this? And he'd sit down and he would paint over your painting, say, Hey, this is how I would solve it. Like, that's amazing. So there's something collaborative about being part of something bigger than just yourself that I learned so much from incredible artists who are some of the best in the world.
Charlotte:Yeah, that's awesome. Would you say that you like digital painting better or normal painting?
David Dibble:I prefer traditional painting just because there's something tactile about it that's really beautiful and that I like. And I used to hate digital painting, because I associated it with video games and everything wrong with our society, right?
Charlotte:Yeah.
David Dibble:But then when I actually went into a studio and started painting digitally almost full time, I realized that in the end, there's very little difference. It's all the same design principles. There's no button that you push that's a magic painting button in Photoshop. It just is another tool that you use. And it made my traditional painting so much better.
David Dibble:Because when I was traditional painting alone, if you need to move something and it's a big painting, they say, well, this tree's in the wrong place. I wanna move it over here. It's a lot of work to do that, to scrape it off and repaint that and paint it over here. And then if it's not the right place, then you have to move it back. There's so much risk involved with making choices and changes in a painting that it makes you fearful and hesitant to really be fearless in a painting.
David Dibble:But digitally, you can throw away as many digital layers as you want. Doesn't matter. It's all digital. So it really helped me become fearless and take a lot of the anxiety out of creativity, and it was a powerful tool that I still use all the time.
Charlotte:Yeah. That's really cool. You can use the same principles for both. How could a high school student begin to explore a career in the arts and animation?
David Dibble:Two fold. Number one is to realize that it's a possibility. I know I felt this way when I first started working in animation. It was in New York. I had strong impostor syndrome.
David Dibble:I felt like I was the bottom of that totem pole, and I was constantly pleading with them to just not fire me. Like, I'm nice enough, maybe they'll let me stick around, because I'm around all these amazing artists, and I'm definitely not as good as any of them. But over time, I realized everybody felt the same way. And somebody has to make a movie. Somebody has to do a painting for a gallery, so why not you?
David Dibble:Right? There's this feeling sometimes that those things happen in these magic cosmopolitan centers somewhere across the globe or somewhere in New York. But all of those things happen by people who are just normal people who happen to want to do that. So if that's something you want to do, then pursue it and know that there's opportunities there for people who are willing to work hard. When I was young, in elementary and junior high and beyond, when I'd say, oh, people say, what do you want to do when you grow up?
David Dibble:If you were to say, I want to be an artist, kind of smile at you and say, well, that's fine for a hobby, but what are you really going to do? You can't really support a family that way. And I'm so grateful that I can, but I think if I'd had someone at that point when I was younger to let me know, sure you can. If you want to, that's great. But it doesn't happen by just sitting around and eating snacks and hoping for it.
David Dibble:You have to work for it. And if you're willing to do the work and you're passionate about it, sure, you can make And that the other thing would just be to do a lot of drawing. And in the beginning, especially junior high, high school, elementary, don't worry too much about rules or I I have to do it this way or that way or I have to try and target it to a certain audience to be professionally viable. That will come with time. But just do what you love to do, create and fall in love with being curious about the world and exploring it visually.
David Dibble:So the best thing you can give your kids is a ton of art supplies and time. And they'll figure out the rest.
Charlotte:Yeah, that's awesome. Would you say you would recommend going into your career path, and if so, why?
David Dibble:Yes, I mean, I love it. I remember when I was in school, would have teachers that would say, if you can do anything other than this, you should do that. But if you can't think of anything besides this, then maybe this is for you. And at the time, I thought it was demoralizing. But I understand now what they meant in the sense of, it's not a casual career.
David Dibble:It's something that you have to really want, and it needs to be something that you are thinking about all the time and that you're doing it even if nobody was paying you to do it. Because most of my day is spent by myself in a studio with no one around telling me what to do. There's no boss giving me quarterly reviews or trying to find quotas for me to hit. I have to be fully self motivated and fully engaged in what I'm doing to stay creatively excited. And you really need to be passionate enough about it, which is why most people don't.
David Dibble:Either it's too hard or they just are interested in other things, and that's fine. So art doesn't have to be a full professional career that supports your entire family or nothing, right? It's not a reality show where if you're not the top three contestants, you don't get to participate in art. It really can be whatever it needs to be in your life. And maybe that's something awesome on the side that doesn't demand anything professionally.
David Dibble:Your creativity can find so many ways to come out. And so it doesn't just have to be one thing or nothing. So give yourself permission to create in whatever way is right for your life.
Charlotte:Yeah, that's great advice, thank you.
Sandy:Yeah. We ask every person we interview to share a joke before we finish our interview. Will you share your favorite joke with us?
David Dibble:Sure. So this was from an artist, Ryan Krucheshnik, years ago that I heard him say it, I think it was pretty clever. He said, a dad and his son were talking one day, and the dad said to his son, son, what do you want to be when you grow up? And the little boy said, dad, I want to be an artist when I grow up. And the dad said, son, you can't have it both ways.
Sandy:Oh, that's
Charlotte:a good one.
David Dibble:So a little bit you do have to have that child in you that refuses to grow up, refuses to do something responsible. And there was a time when people would ask that question, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I've started saying, well, I guess I'll be a lawyer or a doctor. People will respect that. They'll smile when I say, oh, that's great.
David Dibble:That's such a good choice. I would be a horrible lawyer and probably not a great doctor. I would just be an anxious wreck. And so it's Okay to allow your childhood passion to be a part of you and not try and pave that over.
Sandy:Yeah. It's Well,
Charlotte:thank you, mister Dibble. It's been great to have
Sandy:you with us. Yeah. And thank you for taking
Charlotte:the time to
Sandy:talk with us today.
David Dibble:Thank you both. It's a joy to be here with you. Good luck in your work.
Charlotte:Thanks. You too.
Sandy:We hope you enjoyed listening
David Dibble:to this episode.
Sandy:Special thanks to our guests for joining us. And to the Lyceum Orchestra
David Dibble:for providing the music. That's it for American Heritage School
Charlotte:Patriot Podcast. If you learned something new, check out our other episodes and share with a friend. See you.