This is when it takes so long to get through the Christmas cards, when I start getting tempted to draw cartoons in the neighbours’ cards.
Biscuit is a pony with attitude problems but I’m not sure who would come out on top if there was a contest to see who was King of the Meadow, Biscuit or that bruiser of the black and white cat. He’s the kind of cat you see trotting down the road with a vole in his mouth and he’s been known to bust through a neighbour’s cat-flap and push the resident cats away from their food to eat it himself.
A couple of years ago, I drew a rough of this for one of the exercises in Drawing Words and Writing Pictures and, as I’m using it in an article, I’ve enjoyed working on a final version.
I traced my rough (below) in pencil onto layout paper, then scanned and added the colour in Photoshop.
I’m reading Teamwork Means that You Can’t Pick the Side That’s Right, one of Scott Adams’ Dilbert books and decided that I’d try graded backgrounds like he does, fading gradually from dark to light.
Hope that I’ll get the chance to try some more comic strips but I’ve got a lot lined up for the autumn. The squirrel went from being demented in the rough to looking evil in the final version, which is a shame because that might suggest that he deliberately dropped the coconut shell. I was aiming at making him manically determined rather than evil.
Doodle on a paper bag, made when I was roughing out the lettering and cartoons for a Halloween menu board.My sister reading the ‘Fink’s Donuts’ edition of Mad magazine, Dourdogne, 1965.
CONSIDERING THAT as a teenager I only ever bought two or three copies of Mad magazine, I feel that it made a big impression on me.
The American artwork was sharper than the gentler English cartoons of Punch. Besides, Mad was aimed at my age group so instead of the witty verbiage that filled the spaces between the cartoons – which for me were the main event in Punch – there were comic strip satires of television and movies;spoof advertisements, magazine articles and books and regular strips such as Spy v. Spy.
The sheer exuberance of the graphic design made me eager to try out some of the formats for myself. That sense that publications can be fun, that they don’t have to be subtle and worthy, has stayed with me despite the training that I had in graphic design, which probably accounts for the wayward nature of my publications to this day.
Looking out the photograph of my sister in my Summer Holiday 1965 journal I can see an example where I’ve squeezed a cartoon into the margin; what Mad magazine called a Marginal Working Out. An example I remember, drawn across the top of a page on an entirely unrelated article in Mad, was a guitarist looking out at a row of crows sitting on telephone wires and playing along as if he was reading them as notes on a stave. Clever.
My mini cartoon of the car encountering continental calamities isn’t so original; it’s my version of a cartoon that I’d seen in Punch, I imagine that it was a Thelwell, but other cartoonists drew this kind of subject.
Trying to come up with a suitable character for a sign I was hand-lettering. Cow number one was my favourite.
I’m having a rainy day in the studio, clearing my desk, so, before I threw out some scrap paper and a couple of paper bags I thought I’d scan these marginal workings out, drawn when I was working out ideas for various jobs that I’ve been doing.
I don’t think ‘Reg’ in the doodle on the left related to anything at all. He really is just a doodle.
Life is Sweets
Yesterday I watched Life is Sweets, Nigel Slater’s evocation of childhood as remembered through the sweets and chocolate bars he ate at the time. It really was a big thing for him. I remember sweets of course but the memories that make the biggest impression on me, that can bring back a whole little episode in my life are particular books, comics or magazines.
Nigel Slater remembers tastes and textures, I remember things like the feel and smell of the paper in Mad magazine and the crispness of the line work and the half tone printing, the accuracy of the caricatures and so on. I guess that’s why Nigel became a food writer and I became an illustrator.
I’M THINKING about setting the scene in my latest comic strip course exercise, putting figures, in this case a mountaineering version of my Jack and Jill characters, into a panel which has a foreground, middle ground and background.
There’s also a section in this chapter in Drawing Words & Writing Pictures which offers advice on devising figures. I’ve long used what the authors Abel and Madden refer to as figurettes to set a scene, drawing rough figures, similar to a wooden lay figure, consisting of ovals and sausage-shapes to work out action poses.
They ask you to try the technique on figures standing, walking . . .
. . . running and kneeling.
Then to trace figures from a book or magazine using the same ovals and sausage-shapes (the light pencil lines in my sketches, left) then, using these ‘figurettes’ as a basis, to draw a different character in the same pose (dark lines).
As I was saying the other day, this way of a constructing a drawing is the opposite of the process that I’m familiar with in my sketchbook work where careful observation of a figure, animal or building should result in the underlying structure looking convincing.
IN MY regular sketchbook drawing I simply focus on what’s in front of me and, if I observe carefully, as far as subject matter is concerned, the world that I recreate on paper should look reasonably convincing. Characters, costumes, props, perspective and mood should have a ring of truth about them because they’re drawn in a particular place at a particular time. It can be quite a restful way of drawing as you can let yourself go with the flow.
The latest exercise in the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures comic strip course that I’m following turns this process on it’s head. Now it’s down to me to create a plausible world on paper.
I’m now at the pencil stage, working from my Jack & Jill thumbnails (see previous posts), to develop alternative treatments for one of the panels.
Now is the time to sort out all the components of the scene – poses, props, perspective etc – and get them them working together. These are the kind of decisions that I have to make in my occasional forays into set design and scenic painting but there I’m always working in collaboration with a stage manager or stylist, not to mention the props department. In a comic strip I’ve not only got to take on those roles but also got to act as script writer and producer, deciding on the whole approach to telling the story.
The authors, Abel and Madden, ask you to try different styles from realistic to comic book and different camera angles. You then need to stand back from your work, perhaps leaving it overnight so that you can come back to it fresh, and assess how each approach would affect the the story.
They say that you’ll soon realise that the possibilities are endless. It reminds me of the Steven Spielberg quote that when a director starts work on a film, he should feel the same freedom that a writer feels when confronted by a blank sheet of paper.
Speilberg draws the scenes for his films in a similar storyboard fashion before going to the expense of choosing locations, building sets and hiring actors.
Dark Patches
Pencils aren’t intended to be works of art, their purpose is mainly for planning and problem solving. To keep things as clear as possible it’s normal to work at a larger size, say half as big again, as the final print size. To keep the pencil stage visuals uncluttered and readable it’s best to avoid textures and shading, which can obscure lines when it comes to tracing to the final artwork. The ‘X’s in my sketches show which areas would be solid black.
I CAN’T get my wooden lay figure into the dramatic pose that I’m trying to set up for my latest Drawing Words & Writing Pictures tutorial. Every time that I move its arms and legs into the acute angles that I need they spring back to a right angle.
MY NEXT assignment in my cartoon course is to produce a comic strip layout for Jack & Jill. When we took a coffee break on our shopping trip to Outlet Village a man came repeatedly to the water feature in the precinct to fetch a pail of water. The little waterfall at the bottom of the chute is so shallow that he could get only a couple of inches in his bucket on each trip.
I think that Jack in the nursery rhyme has to be a boy as he’s paired with Jill who I always take to be his sister but perhaps there’s something about the workman and his setting that I can use in my comic strip.
Jack and Jill
Here’s my take on the nursery rhyme, inspired by the workman and the water feature and, taking a cue from the baseball hat, going for a location on a dustbowl stricken American farm.
This exercise is to take the story to the thumbnail stage only, so excuse the rudimentary sketches. The subtleties would come later, but I guess that this is as far as we’re intended to take it. As you’ll know if you’ve read previous posts, I’m following the course in Jessica Abel & Matt Madden’s book Drawing Words & Writing Pictures.
This exercise is about different kinds of transition, seven of them in total; the light bulb, for example, is a rather cliched symbollictransition to represent a bright idea.
Page two starts with a scene-to-scene transition. Different location, different time of day;
Not only a change of scene but we seem to have moved into a Mad Max post-apocalyptical world.
I should explain that the last frame represents my attempt at that almost impossible transition, the non-sequitur. Almost impossible because as readers we’ll always try and invent our own stories to link two random frames, no matter how unrelated they are.
As soon as I drew Humpty Dumpty, I realised that he has a very obvious connection with fellow nursery rhyme characters Jack & Jill, but as he’s a poster boy for nonsense and paradox (he even gets a mention in Finnegan’s Wake), I want to keep him in there.
In fact, having got a taste for telling stories, something I very rarely attempt, I now want to know why he’s talking to someone about asparagus. I’ve got a theory.
IF YOU START working out your ideas for a comic strip with thumbnails (quick pencil roughs) you can check that all the elements of the story – words, pictures, the way they break up into panels – fit together coherently before committing yourself to anything approaching final artwork.
This exercise from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures calls for you to create your own characters, perhaps taking inspiration from staple characters of long-running comic strips such as a married couple, a group of children or talking animals.
I looked out of the window for inspiration but Biscuit the Welsh pony in the meadow wouldn’t work because he’s always on his own. Barbara suggested that the characters with most comic potential in our garden are the pheasants. Her favourite is the female who stands under the bird table pecking fallen sunflower hearts from the edge of the patio, as if she’s sitting at a desk.
The male struts about pompously, so you assume that he’s always heading for an undignified fall.
With my first quick draft I realised that I didn’t need the ‘desk’; amusing as it is, it plays no part in the story. To present the dialogue in the correct order I needed to move the female to the right.
I’M BACK exploring the final frontier; comic strips. Here’s the next panel in the little story that I’m illustrating as part of the Drawing Words & Writing Pictures course.
My first attempt had the astronaut planting the flag but for him to do this with his right hand was awkward, if I wanted to keep the left to right action that runs through a western comic strip (it goes the opposite way in Japanese Manga comics).
Hopefully the implication is that he has just planted it himself, rather than discovered an existing flag on the moon he’s just landed on.
It’s tricky explaining a sequence of events in just one panel, but I can now move on to the end of the story. These last two panels show his return being greeted with much fanfare and his realisation that he’s landed on the wrong planet.
Sat-nav
The next part of the exercise is to add some extra panels and gags. The first thing that occurred to me was to cover the abrupt jump from moon to alien planet so here’s the lunar module heading back on its return journey.
How does the astronaut become lost in space? It’s got to be his sat-nav that’s faulty. Uttoxeter was the first town to mind when I thought of sat-nav, so Utopia sounded like a suitable name for an alien planet. Taunton and Titan might just work or Mars and Marsden . . .
No, it could only be Uttoxeter. That ‘x’ in the middle makes it sound suitably alien. Or wrong.
Just to tie things up I include a frame to show touch-down on the wrong planet.
Here’s the new, extended sequence;
Seeing all eight panels together really gives the impression that this is some kind of a story.
So my truncated new story could start with the sat-nav problem and end with meeting the aliens. Not very funny but at least it has a beginning a middle and an end. I have much to learn.
I’ve been eager to get back to my Drawing Words & Writing Pictures tutorials but other commitments intervened however here I am with a – shh!, don’t tell anybody – free weekend so I’m resuming with the chapter 3 tutorial The wrong planet, an activity devised by Pahl Hluchan.
I’m starting by illustrating their suggested five panel story. Each panel is drawn on a 3 x 3 inch square of cartridge paper to which I’ll add extra panels to pad out the action and extra gags if I can think of any, then subtract panels to see how few panels my extended story can be whittled down to.
Post-it Panels
A three inch square of cartridge is a fiddly piece of paper to draw on; the tutorial recommends using post-it notes which sounds a better idea as they’d stay put as you work on them, but I hadn’t got any, so I’ve cut down some 120 gsm Canson cartridge which is a pleasanter surface to work on than the scrap paper that I usually grab for tutorials.
The panels need to be separate for the editing process. This is intended to be a group exercise where you’d mix and match each other’s artwork, sticking the post-it notes on the wall, but I’m going for the one-man version, for the kind of student that the authors refer to as a Ronin, a Ronin being, as I mentioned back in the summer, a freelance samurai who wandered around feudal Japan, or, in my case, a wilfully reclusive freelance illustrator enjoying being holed up in his studio for the weekend (shortly after I wrote that Barbara and I had to pop out with an urgent book order!).
Lamy Safari
Pentel Brush Pen
I’m using my Lamy Safari fountain pen which is my current favourite for writing and for relaxed drawing. I’ve been inking in the blacks with a Pentel Brush Pen.
The Safari is filled with a Lamy ink cartridge. I haven’t tried it with waterproof Noodler’s ink.
This is when it takes so long to get through the Christmas cards, when I start getting tempted to draw cartoons in the neighbours’ cards.
This exercise from Drawing Words & Writing Pictures calls for you to create your own characters, perhaps taking inspiration from staple characters of long-running comic strips such as a married couple, a group of children or talking animals.
