"Watering Hole"

Hearkening back to the advise of my longterm art adviser while getting my BFA: "Jamie, it's okay to fantasize, just fantasize correctly." Meaning, the elevated point-of-view for this panel was completely fabricated, as I didn't have access to a crane for reference shot, just residual memory from many, many trips to haul water (a ritual for those of us living the dream of a dry cabin lifestyle). In one way that is the essence of a cartoon: drawing "visual shorthand," ie just enough information in the marks to trigger an association in the viewer's mind. So it rarely, if ever, has to be "realistic" in the sense of exact photographic depiction. So through linear perspective it's possible to literally fill in the blanks and make it up, at least to the point where it's believable... so that "it works."

And I needed to deliberately arrange the elements in the composition so as to clearly delineate the foreground (people + pickups), the midground (the structure), and the background (the looming presence of one of the delivery trucks pulling around behind to fill it's tank).
This pencil (posted below) is also a great example of where you can see how much I just "draw through" things, like they are transparent, and successively build up layers of overlapping shapes and objects, working roughly from the back to the front of the pictorial plane, from largest object to smallest, and then and only then fill in the details. In this way one effectively sets the stage as it were, building places to put in the people and props.