Working with both hands, Karen Johnson animates a design for Madison College’s Animation and Cartooning Program using Flash.

With her left hand, she draws with a stylus on a Wacom tablet, while her right is busy with the keyboard of her laptop. She has worked as an animator for over thirty years.

Since starting her animation studio in Racine, Wis. at the age of 19, she has worked with big names such as Disney on feature films, including “FernGully: The Last Rainforest,” as well as on shorter pieces, webisodes, and even apps and web banners. Starting out in the animation business is hard on its own. But starting one’s own studio, especially as a woman in a heavily male-dominated profession, is even more rare.

“I wanted to raise my kids in Racine,” Johnson explained. After attending UW-Madison for Fine Arts in 1972, she met an animator who was in her freshman class.

He inspired Johnson so much that she quit school and started her studio. She worked for 30 years for herself, proving that, though it is hard, it is possible to make a career of 2-D animation. Now,

Johnson is an instructor in Madison College’s animation program, teaching the foundations of traditional animation as well as Toonboom, which is the industry’s standard.

On Thursday in the Student Lounge, Johnson gave a demonstration on using Flash and Toonboom, to make animations during an Animation and Cartooning Program open house. She demonstrated how one uses a tablet and stylus to draw shapes, and how Flash integrates them into a single animation.

She also let students give animating a try, and walked them through the basics of Flash and Wacom use. “It takes about eight hours [to do a simple animation],”  Johnson said, “It’s a full day’s work.”

Jeff Butler, a comic book and concept artist, also attended the open house, giving drawing demos on character creation. He teaches cartooning and character development classes at the DTEC campus through the continuing education program.