A Visual Artist Animated His Childhood Love for Skateboarding

With a pared-down aesthetic and an appreciation for witnessing the brush strokes, animator Freddy Arenas carves out a hovel of personal creation on his social media account, featuring skateboarding tricks and summer bike rides. A student of visual communications, Arenas tended to his artistic muscle in the form of animation experiments in both 2D and 3D. He eventually parlayed his skills into a career as an art director and animator.

What stands out most from his work is a sleek style that forgoes an excess of flourishes, never muddling the artist's visual language. Arenas boasts a star-studded rolodex, counting Kaplan, Inc., Netflix, and Google News as clients for illustrations and stop-motion animation. In his growing portfolio, the motion-savvy artist brings both original human characters and disembodied graphics to the table. Arenas artist treats his Instagram as his own corner for experimental expression, where he can explore some of the latest themes rolling around his head.

In recent posts, Arenas hones in on his childhood passion for skateboard tricks, and his warm-weather love for biking down New York’s alleyways. The animator’s Instagram serves as an everyday microcosm of his mind’s playful aesthetic: low pressure, but high-end results. Of the artistic ideals behind his Instagram, he tells The Creators Project: “I've always try to do personal experiments on the side. At first, I was using them as a way to try out new animation and illustrations styles, but at some point they just turned into the kind of stuff I like doing and that I'm not always able to do for clients.”

Arenas has an appreciation for social media platforms, and often harnesses the internet’s short attention span to make pieces that reflect the fly-by-night nature of his audience. He shares, “The one thing interesting about sharing the experiments on Instagram is the sense of immediacy. It keeps me wanting to make content constantly and at the same time it feels ephemeral which takes the pressure off, so is easy to try things out without been too precious about.”

A video posted by Freddy Arenas (@fred.arenas) on

Nov 17, 2016 at 1:16pm PST

A video posted by Freddy Arenas (@fred.arenas) on

Nov 23, 2016 at 5:05am PST

See more animations from Freddy Arena, on his website, here, and follow his experiments on Instagram, here.

Related:

Bittersweet Animation Tells the Tale of Leonard Cohen’s “Two Went to Sleep”

Why It’s Better To Animate a Film Alone, Even If It Takes 4 Years

A Slice-of-Life Stop-Motion Set During an Argentine Dictatorship