"Stick with what works!"

     Great little show & tell done this recently ended school year with a local high-school art class. I totally spaced out bringing the slide-show of inspirational examples from other artists + student works + my own process (left both the disc and backup jump-drive on the coffee-table at the cabin). Fortunately fielding questions and the demo with accompanying ramble - think director's cut commentary narration on a DVD - took up 45-minutes so the supplemental stuff wasn't crucial. Passing around physical examples of pieces is always vastly more superior than looking at pictures of the same work anyways.
     Prefaced the talk with saying my work appears in this thing called a "newspaper" that gets published every day, which was a source of confusion or amusement to the youngsters. Always well worth pointing out how that particular media still gets tens of thousands of eyeballs on the cartoon, and so is a perfectly valid platform that dovetails quite well with a supplemental on-line presence (or the reverse in some instances).

   Best part - or worst part, depending on one's perspective, part was a lesson about Freudian slips for cartoonists, as in how simply awesome Charles Schulz’s “Penis” strip is (awkward pause... look at The Significant Otter in the back of the classroom: "Did I just say that?"... much laughter).
   The specific sample panel I inked in won't run until the fall season, but I finished it up in the studio that night so the class could see a final (digital) print version the next day, and we bounced around some caption ideas too.
   And yeah, for the bold foreground elements in the panel, I actually used the same damn stick my former college instructor (Larry Vienneau) made me pick off a tree in front of the Art Department for Beginning Drawing way back in 1990.

"Stick with what works!"