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Aspiring artists of Greensboro will get an exclusive trip to Springfield for free, courtesy of ArtQuest.

In what can only be dubbed one of the coolest things ever, the hands-on art gallery for children and families will present free workshops titled "Squares to Cubes, Circles to Spheres: The Art of 'The Simpsons.' " Hosting the sessions will be storyboard artist Lucas Gray, who has worked on the hit animated Fox television series for 13 years, as well as last summer's "The Simpsons Movie."

Gray started working on "The Simpsons" in the summer of 1991 after completing two years of art school.

"I was not really looking for work in animation," Gray says. "My idea was to get some exposure to computer animation."

The show's offices gave him a take-home test — a common practice in animation that requires artists to draw whatever objects they are applying to work with on the show (characters, backgrounds, props, etc.). Gray passed. Before he knew it, he was working on the most popular cartoon sitcom on network TV.

"At first I was a clean-up artist, which is basically tracing other people's backgrounds," Gray says.

After doing clean-up on other people's work for two years, Gray's department moved to Korea, where most work on "The Simpsons" takes place. Gray started designing props for the series during the fifth season, then left the show to finish college.

"I sort of took some life drawing and built the skills I would need if I wanted to get back into animation and be a character layout artist," Gray says. "And so, then I took a character test when I was done with college and started doing that in the ninth season."

Gray's current duties on the show as a storyboard artist require him to take one-third of the series' scripts written each year and envision each episode shot by shot while mapping them out on paper.

"It's basically like making a rough little comic book that gets handed out to the animators," Gray says.

For the workshops, Gray plans to demonstrate some of the finer points of cartooning.

"I think it's pretty useful stuff, and I don't necessarily see it all in books that I get about how to cartoon and how to draw," Gray says.

"I feel like they leave out important pieces of information that you can maybe only get by demonstrating the technique."

The overall look of characters and backgrounds on "The Simpsons" might lack the detail found in theatrical animation or even comic books. However, Gray describes the precise combination of lines and basic shapes as being "deceptively challenging."

"A Disney animator who worked on 'The Simpsons Movie' said that drawing these characters was the hardest thing he had ever done before," Gray says.

With "The Simpsons" approaching its milestone 20th season this fall and showing no signs of quitting, Gray wonders if he'll ever leave the show. He has kept his ears open for other options and other shows, but for now, he'll just take it one season at a time.

"Sometimes I think about quitting before the show ends, but it's a pretty good job," Gray says. "Because of (the yearly) hiatus giving me time to take a break and do my own work during that time and travel, it's pretty hard to leave it."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com