Spring cleaning at the studio, and time to stick a pitchfork into the mental mulch-pile so as to properly aerate the compost heap of ideas that has been fermenting away inside my head all winter long. As evidenced by the accumulated detritus in the back of my current sketchbook, I have been slacking on transcribing the random collection of hurriedly jotted-down ideas (on any scrap of paper within reach) into a more easily understood compositional thumbnails onto the actual pages. This often entails some interpretation, and there have been many instances I will sit and stare at the scribbles, and honestly have no idea what they are. By some definitions cartoons are supposed to be quick, loose and simple marks on a piece of paper that stand for something - visual shorthand if you will. But some of these overly abstracted doodles remain a mystery even to me - something similar to what I know readers occasionally feel when trying to understand many of my finished panels - "I don't get it." Many times these fragments are just pictures without any words, or jotted down lines that need to have an accompanying illustration. In theory the process of working up ideas into the sketchbook is supposed to streamline the concepts and allow for some editing of the imagery so as to facilitate faster understanding. But if the creator of said sketches is stumped, just let it go man, turn the page. Eventually the scraps get either worked up or abandoned, and my desktop - the literal one as opposed to the virtual one on the computer, which oftentimes undergoes the same annual excavation - starts to look like the leftover masticated material from a busy colony of hamsters. Which, if you know me, is a fairly accurate description of the way my mind works.
Back on the proverbial wheel...
No comments:
Post a Comment