"Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence." - Jules Feiffer
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Tabula rasa: skim over some reading material (any one of various dictionaries, reference books and cartoon anthologies currently shelved in the rack), and eventually assume the vacant stare as the infinite and random associations begin to play out in my fresh, empty head. I used to have an old folk toy as a kid, a Jacob's Ladder, and my thinking process is similar to that; an initial idea is turned over and over, clunking down a string of attached concepts and then begun anew, constantly shuffled and remixed into ever-expanding and frequently less rational and unpredictable non-sequiturs.
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Daily exposure to the seasonal environments obviously informs and inspires to some degree: Camp Robbers and ravens provide an entertaining soundtrack as birch leaves cascade down around me and the sweet-rot scent of fall permeates everything. Thoughts of hunting and Halloween are prompted by a moose calf with two yearlings wandering around the cabin. Yesterday, a young bull came through with its rack tangled up in rope, dragging more than twenty feet behind it, and I was halfway towards it think about grabbing the loose end and tying it to tree so as to figure out how to cut it off, when I had a vision of the girlfriend coming home after work and finding my flattened corpse out in the yard. That or being dragged through the neighborhood, which probably wouldn't raise too many eyebrows with my reputation. See, these ideas just come to me; you sometimes just have to sit and wait for 'em.
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Those couple took a bit more time + attention than usual; taking it as far as I can go or at the least pushing the envelope as far as my artistic comfort zone with the drawing end can be frustrating. Keeping in mind the mantra "a good joke will sell a bad drawing" I'm aware that this isn't creative compensation in trying to shore up a dumb joke - they all are, so that's never an issue - I'll instead try and see if the scenario I envision can actually be executed. Or at least have it make sense to someone other than me, which more often than not is the rub. After an hour or so of struggling to ink in a fairly detailed composition (for a simple cartoon) one begins to fight the nagging question of what's the point, and worse, only to have it fail right before your eyes after not pulling off whatever scenario you hoped for. Maybe it can be successfully resurrected using digital means, which'll take another hour invested in what still might eventually turn out to be hopeless and futile, but hey, this isn't necessarily a deliberate, outcome-oriented process anyways. And this medium isn't exactly one known for painstaking attention to details, so there is a definite point of diminishing returns where one mentally throws up the hands and says it's good enough, time to move on. I mean, one of the enduring bits of advice I've heard: don't sweat the petty stuff.
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan
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