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 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, just sketching what’s in front of him and living in the moment. He captures what he sees using ink and watercolor, tools that are light and don’t take up much space.
“For me creating is relaxing—and creating at work is not relaxing,” he says, adding that for filmmakers there’s a lot of pressure, speed, and collaboration which can be great but can also be sometimes frustrating. Sketching is the only time he gets to do artwork for himself, with nobody telling him what to do. “It’s meditative and healing,” he says.
While each serves a different purpose, Pajdlhauser’s animation work and personal sketching go hand in hand.
“As visual development artists working in animation, we require strong observational drawing and painting skills,” he explains. “So, it’s something that we all do in our spare time to practice and… to build a library in our minds of what the world around us looks like in order to recreate these worlds or to create new worlds.”
Birling skateboard shop and café.The style and process he’s developed have influenced his work on projects that include an unannounced feature film at Netflix and an unannounced series at Sony Pictures—not only just visually, but also in workflow. With most animation work being digital, he says, you have the ability to edit and change your mind much more easily than you can with a traditional medium. The endless cycle of undoing might be great in development, but it can interfere with getting work done on time. He’s found there’s a permanence to working with ink that helps him commit to decisions. If he accidentally draws too much, or his pen drips, he has to work around that and still finish a balanced piece. This practice has enabled him to flow through his digital work a lot faster.
In the coming year, Pajdlhauser plans to publish another art book, which will most likely be a compilation of recent favorite sketches, including many of Los Angeles. Having never felt comfortable with the idea of creating big paintings and having gallery shows, he feels that sketch books are the most natural way to share his work. On top of this, he still makes time to skateboard. And because skateboarding is a popular sport that is easily accessible, it’s a good vehicle for him to engage with underserved youth while opening doors to art, photography, and design. His volunteering has taken him as far as the West Bank where he was a skateboard instructor with the nonprofit SkatePal. While there, he sketched enough material to put together a book of art that he self-published.
Pajdlhauser’s travels also include hosting sketching workshops in distant locales. Urban sketching has taken off as an artform in recent years, and on these trips he shares his approach: observe subject matter, simplify it, and focus on what’s important. But his workshops aren’t just about sharing his skills. He views them as a symbiotic relationship in which he contributes to the urban sketching community and is in turn provided with a way to sustain his travels and personal art.
Learn more about Pajdlhauser and his upcoming September workshop in Greece at captaintom.studio.
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