Burl-y Cartoon

Yesterday's Nuggets appearing in the News-Miner. Another in-class demo for the pen & ink portion of the recent semester, experimenting with different implements to achieve a range of values through texture and marks. I've often thought about leaving random lingerie items around particularly shapely birch trees in the woods surrounding the cabin - puts a different spin on "tree-hugger." Yeah, the winters are mighty long up here, and strange things are done under the midnight sun...

More thoughts after the jump...

Something with diptych (or even strips) (no pun intended) formats I like to play around with deliberate visual tangents between the panels/over the gutter, for example implying a continual background but offsetting it with just enough variation to establish a discreet difference.
Here's some meta-geek: just to give you insight over how much painstaking attention to detail cartoonists lavish upon a seemingly simple setup. It was a conscious design decision to shift the verbage from being in caption boxes and situated across the top of the panels, to open and under the frames instead. Hinging on my argument as to why single-panel gag cartoons are closer to "sequential art" than is often credited, the theory is that in the split-second initial perceptual cognizance behind initially interpreting the image + text, there is a fractional lag in first viewing, then combining the separate elements. This underpins the effective "timing" even within the confines of a single-panel (versus a strip with gutters) - the pacing of getting the joke is set up first by seeing the picture followed immediately by reading the words and immediately after those two are juxtaposed the congruity or incongruity is resolved, equivalent to the delivery of a punch-line. In other words, you don't ever simultaneously assimilate images and words together, they happen at infinitesimally but inarguably distinct and linear moments. Hence the shifting of the verbage in this particular example to after the "reading" of the image would happen (assuming a Western reflexive visual scan of left-to-right, top-to-bottom) sets up the pacing differently than if left as seen in the version posted below.
Wow, talk about pole-vaulting over mouse turds moose nuggets: this gives you an approximate idea what occupies a frighteningly significant percentage of my attention. I ain't just staring off into space, my brain's pondering weighty matters like this (probably a habit picked from observing cat behavior).


Also, as evidenced by the original sketchbook doodle posted below, there is quite often a couple different takes on the same topic. Or, as per my schizophrenic winsome personality, pick between witty & droll, or blunt & dumb (otherwise known as the difference between Friday nights and Monday mornings).