Well this is the first 1st Friday in a decade that I don't have an annual retrospective of the best cartoons of the year down at the distillery. Nor anywhere else (except the required faculty exhibition) this year, like cafes, dispensaries, museums or galleries, and only the one public gig for the newspaper.
A few more notes below the fold...
Oh yay one of those year's-end seasonal reviews: a traditional chest-thumping recap - but that's pretty much what a navel-gazing blog does anyways, so perhaps much more fitting to feature instead student work, or more accurately, students working. So along those lines I'll share an insight that changed the way I live, or at the least, look at life. Which, sure, sounds like a cheesy infomercial, so here’s a caveat that it’ll probably revert back to normal mental cruising altitude ie skimming barely high enough to avoid a crash in a few more days, or hours update: too late. Something something mood swing? Reminds me of one of my favorite quips from an old dear friend Jeri (whom I still miss almost once a week): “when you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot, hang on, and swing!”
Anyways I was recently interviewed by a student for a Communication class paper they were writing, and I talked AT them for a solid hour in my office, like some sort of a sourdough professor. But in all seriousness it uncorked something that was on the verge of being forgotten, the resurrection of a recent idea - one of the usual thousand this week - to revisit the habit of taking snapshots of people's hands holding their respective artistic implements whist drawing. But as opposed to the way I had traditionally (see here, here, and here) focused on – the range in diversity of their unique, individual grips while sketching – this time I wanted to include equal attention to what they were drawing, namely that they’re all drawing comics.
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Because the specific epiphany I had was like a literal cartoon lightbulb moment going off over my head that all three of my current classes at this exact moment of time in this semester were all simultaneously engaged in drawing comics. The awareness, or inciting insight, dawned on me after a sudden realization right in the middle of one class that everyone was all actively and intensely engaged with their respective three-page comic (required in all my Beginning Drawing courses). Think of calm in the eye of a creative storm, sitting there leaning back at my desk in the center of the studio where I had been doing a demo, and looking all around the room, seeing such focused energy, let alone at 8am.
The semesterly class schedule specifies several “open studios,” which are relatively rare, an they mean my hands are mostly off the wheel, stop being one of those "helicopter teachers" (probably makes more sense these days to refer to us instead of as a "drone professor") who endlessly hovers around micro-managing ongoing assignments. These are the days that being an effective teacher can sometimes mean simply standing there holding a door open, and not getting the way: no lecture, no overt lesson, more an emphasis on creating a space. It's like a collective cocoon, a buffer zone against the cold + dark of winter hitting and the constant existential dread of current events. Put on some cool music, sip a cuppa coffee, and hang out and draw for a couple hours. How cool is that? You know, like a real artist, making art. Sure it's for a class, and for a specific assignment, but still, "it's your story, you tell it however you want."
But wait: then the next morning, the very same exact thing in another class, with the added bonus of connecting even more dots realizing that later on that evening it would happen yet again in this semester’s Cartoon & Comic Arts course. Now I’m used to the creative oasis which that particular unit in all my drawing classes offers me every semester, but the convergence of all three of current classes was like a whoa dude, big picture, full circle, you have officially arrived moment. How humbling and so awesome to see what a special moment in time it was, like everything in life was leading up to this.
Sure it surely had already happened last spring, with an identical schedule, but I was so consumed with the occupational stresses of a first-time full-time professor I hadn’t taken the time to reflect on such things. Acknowledgement of this Grand Confluence of Significant Events is a way to feel weirdly grateful for my wife, cats, friends, fellow faculty, staff and students, and know that nomatter how screwed up life has been, with so many bad choice and wrong turns along the way, if everything has led to this, than it’s all good, and I wouldn’t change a thing. Livin' the dream I tell ya.
All tolled that’s almost fifty students that, as of this writing, are all bent over their respective pages, inking away. Soon I'll scan and format over a hundred pages of their comics to get the class comic books formatted for the printer – along with the few 420’s/Advanced independent projects published as well - and also hang all the corresponding pages of original art in the hallway display cases. In short, awash in a wave of comics: Reading them, teaching about them, drawing them, doing demos, critiquing them, piles and piles of them on every flat surface of the office, in the car, and at home. Not to mention just a few weeks ago a wall of comics in the gallery as part of a student’s BFA thesis exhibit. So this is sort of a semesterly Cosmic Alignment of Harmonic Cartoon Convergence.
Stay ‘tooned for another (like last year's) really big data-dump – we’re talking wharrgarble caliber - where I catch up on samples of student works in all of the semester’s courses.
Especially the... you guessed it, comics.
A few more addendums to the recent updates on extracurricular activities from over the summer. Also I now have an excuse to post this shot from my studio overlooking the early morning light, which is dwindling fast... more below the fold!
Here’s a brief teaser (in case I space for another year posting more about it like a formal review) about a book that gave me such an academic oasis that I can’t rave enough about it. "Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States" (review here and here) by Michelle Ann Abate was just published last year by Rutgers University Press. The only mild criticism, on account of a personal bias, is the omission of Kliban’s work, who’s seminal contribution to the genre of single-panel gag cartoons, especially of his unique style in both rendering and type of humor that predated – and opened the door for – Larson’s “Far Side” (another featured artist in this book). But that is balanced by the surprising perspective brought to bear on deconstructing Bill Keane’s “Family Circus” in an new appreciation of one of more benign features ever created, that has largely escaped critical attention.
While perhaps a wee bit wordy, as the target demographic is
definitely not the average aficionado of cartoons, the book consolidates many
resources and succinctly sums up similar arguments that it took me fifty pages
to make for my own MFA thesis on this very topic. And as both a college professor and a professional practitioner for almost forty years, this is a magnificent treatise Along with this summer’s workshop with Hilary Price,
that’s now twice in one year that I’ve heard and read about the cognitive perception of the
elements – pictures and words/image and text (though not always verbal) – can
and does create a sequential processing through the deliberate compositional
arrangement of said components. Rebutting the overshadowing influence of Scott
McCloud’s restrictive definitions (of which another genre, that of comics
poetry, stands in contrast to) and acknowledging that yes, not only do comics
count as a legitimate artform, single-panel gag panels can and do count as
comics as well.
Also apologies for the brutal picture of committing the cardinal sin of
dog-earing (and underlining + highlighting + notes-in-margins): I can faintly
hear the snorts of disapproval from the ghost of my reference librarian mother
over such heretical damage.
As a follow-up to a recent posting about the process of selecting representative work for an application to join the National Cartoonist Society, here's the rejection letter. Not that in the grand scheme of things do these things actually matter, which is the same as what I say to students who get their work rejected for the annual student art exhibition in our department gallery. Or any show anywhere for that matter: it's a healthy recognition that while sometimes it can hurt, the reality is that it has little to no bearing on your overall success as an artist. Note that it's the same with getting work accepted into a show - hooray, but don't get carried away: at some point you will deal with someone's bias and ignorance, which also works both ways, as anyone who's ever participated in a critique with the informed (one hopes) opinions of others can tell. Anyways, it's a humbling reminder that being a big fish in an even bigger pond - a sea really - is always gonna be comparatively insignificant to the folks with followers up there in the millions. After over a few deacdes in this market I reckon I "only" get 10-20k pairs of eyeballs a week peeking at my panels between platforms (on-line + print), not to mention the mountains of merch that's moved over the years. Since there are no clear guidelines, it's anyone's guess as to what degree this criteria weighs in on the scale of acceptance, but it's a safe assumption syndication is the threshold.
One metric I've mentioned many a time before is how for so long the cartoons actually paid the rent. That's something to be really proud of, as the gig economy gets really old for dancing bear circus acts. Now, mind you, as the Significant Otter often points out, there are actually a lot of other bills as well. Nevertheless, as the guidelines stipulate, “NCS membership is open to all creative professionals who earn a substantial part of their income working in the fields of cartooning, illustration, animation and graphic storytelling. We are an organization of esteemed peers and we welcome new members!” Again, reading between the lines, the non-syndicated probably need not apply, and presumably the role of education in the comics arts is not taken seriously as well. Kudos are in order though for their membership committee makeup, it's now far deeper than their historical roster of legacy winners - there's hope it'll eventually evolve along with the limping industry.
Accolades from the art department saved the day: As fortune had it, shortly thereafter, I was caught by surprise at the outpouring of promotional postings the UAF College of Liberal Arts + UAF Fine Arts did in ramping up publicity for the final First Friday - actually the entire month of the show - at Ursa back in January (see posts here & here). Always grateful for their recognition + support of peers that are near!
PS: Also as a side-note to that same recent posting wherein I also humblebragged about cracking a million unique visits to Ink & Snow, I neglected to look at the tiny little ticker way down at the bottom of the right-hand menu - seems my suspicion about most of the traffic (three quarters?) being bots and/or solipsistic navel-gazing was probably true, although I can't remember exactly what the statistical data points are for tracking with this program from when I originally set the blog up back in 2009. Well anyways, I'm still hear, and so are you too - thanks as always.
So sometime earlier this month I evidently passed a million hits. I think that's all time unique visits - excluding mine - starting from the first post on day one: January 15th, 2009. Not that I particularly care about traffic (someday sooner than later I'll maybe get around to using Google Analytics so I can properly parse the whatwhowhenwhere), and maybe even monetize the whole operation. In the meantime Ink & Snow's still a space where I can continually share recent works + random thoughts, document gigs, accomplishments & adventures, provide a bit of education by uploading examples via process posts, showcase unpublished pages, chum the waters and scream into the void. Anyways, glad you're here.
When they say "sometimes it's the little things," that ain't no joke. Especially something so serious as a signature, especially one that adorns a cartoon. It's the pinnacle of branding, second in importance only to a logo as far as the unique distillation and encapsulation of one's artistic identity and marketing image. Not really, since the pseudoscience of graphology is as equally illegitimate for either signatures or lettering. But for the first post of the year, here's a sneak peek at the new chicken-scratch of a scrawl that'll eventually replace the one perfected over many years of practice. It'll be a few more months before it shows up in print, and a few more after that before making an appearance here on Ink & Snow. But file this post under "for those of our viewers keeping score at home."
Geez that makes for four major makeovers in my recent artistic journey. It's only been since 2021-ish that I - creatively speaking - yanked out the rug from under my own two feet by voluntarily flipping the ratio of color panels versus the traditional black & white ones on its head. Now it's comparatively rare that I leave anything grayscale. Then, a few years later, there was an existential crisis of realizing I hated the way I was using color digitally, and decided to change that.
Now what's as unconsciously second nature as tying a shoelace has to be methodically practiced until perfect. Technically I've been digitally cut-and-pasting a stock signature for my headers on the feature panel for decades now (not exactly when the most recent one first started getting used), it was more of a stylistic choice as opposed to (just) being lazy. Still it feels new, it feels like a private little spit-shine: I like the playfulness of moving the dot over the "j" thereby making it lower-case, and shortening the overall length.
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| "ahhh... now I see" |
Ganging together on this post a few recent examples from the "Nuggets Sketchbook" series that occasionally punctuates the regular panels. For some unknown reason there was an unusual number of them this year: these three which were published in the paper this past July, September and October, plus previously ones in March and August (both of which were uploaded here earlier in another set of sketchbook samples). "Currant Mood" is sorta special to me as it's about something that most newspaper readers probably aren't familiar with, so they'll never get it, and those that would probably get it never read the newspaper, so they'll never see it. But fortunately it went on to occupy a third dimension...
Update: This particular panel was the only one out of four submissions of mine to get accepted for the 2024 "64th Parallel" annual juried exhibition of the Fairbanks Arts Association (the others were "The Lodge," "Rush Hour" and "No Lives Matter"). This was the first show my work's been selected since 2017, o fourteen years - maybe half of which work was entered... the meta-lesson here being just never give up, don't ever stop chumming the water. Incidentally the fifth of six (possibly seven) shows this year alone, and that's why for 2025 I'm gonna swing to the opposite extreme and not do any, take a few years off from the endless marketing.
Regular readers know that these "Sketchbooks" are little offshoots are a special insight into creating the cartoons where I feel it provides a nice little break from the more commercial (some think contrived) vibe or visual feel of the regular feature. Put another way the aesthetics are a bit more spontaneously or raw, as opposed to the comparatively more controlled and polished look of the formal pencil > ink > digitally colored process for the "normal" panels.
The origins actually arose from when I was essentially homeless, couchsurfing at a girlfriend's cabin, and without access to my accustomed computed + scanner setup. So I temporarily resorted to just submitting images shot directly from the pages of my sketchbook. One meta-lesson that gave me insight into my work was how essentially incidental the whole professional standards of production were: nobody particularly gave/gives a shit that I use specialized equipment and rarefied, arcane tools (ex: and insistence on archival materials etc.), aside from other geeks. The only factor that really matters is the content ie how funny it is. This is reflected in the industry mantra "a good joke will sell a bad drawing, which goes a long way towards explaining the style of many a successful cartoon. Nevertheless I have always continued in my quest towards self-improvement - 2019's reboot of "Spring Breakup" illustrates this perfectly, as some measure of pride in craftsmanship is inherent in any artistic pursuit.
Of all of these latest ones in the series, this particular panel to me is a touch more special than the rest, in that not only was the printed version a reworking of the original doodle (from the initial one done on a scrap of paper > then translated into the sketchbook variation), but the charming simplicity of the piece really stands out. The only aspect of it altered was the digital spot-coloring of the heart, all else is marker + water-soluble wash. Incidentally the pen is a Micron (08), which I after many, many years of using ballpoint pens for the sketchbook doodles, I have adopted full-time this year, mostly because erasing the underlying pencil without waiting for it to dry so as to avoid smearing the ink is a pain in the ass - this is much quicker and also more opaque. It's still a "dead" line, meaning no line weight variation which is the hallmark of dip-pens.
Bonus: this is also one of the relatively rare non-verbal panels, which is another factor in its primitive clarity... reflective of my current relationship situation. It's quietly exceptional enough that I selected it as one of the three pieces showcased in the annual faculty exhibition in the UAF art department - subverting expectations with a thumb in the eye of artsy-fartsy elite.
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| Role model: "You must dig deep inside yourself" |
Meanwhile over on Instagram I've been able to look under the online table and observe a bit more details as far as traffic goes, as they have a decent "view insight" function for the professional accounts. You can track views which I can't on Facebook (as it's a personal page), and in a limited sense here on Ink & Snow, as there's no way of differentiating between bots and humans (75 followers, of which 24-ish are weekly readers, versus 8k visits per month/100k a year). *Note we're approaching an all-time readership event horizon of one million hits (955k as of this posting), which'll happens sometime over the next few months. Woo-hoo.
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| A sample grab from a recent popular post |
Hand-in-glove with the organic rise in numbers has been a steady increase in viewers, to hundreds and even over a thousand viewers per post now. The IG metrics give a clearer insight as to the ratio of readers versus folks who actually engage with a post enough to leave a "like" or "love," or even go above & beyond with a comment and/or share. This somewhat akin to foot traffic in meatspace, and why it's important to actually write a note in the guest-book at any exhibition - otherwise the artist has no idea, unless you corner them at the opening. I've been really liking IG, even though I initially joined so as to escape the evil clutches of FB, and then Meta bought it. Haven't deviated from only uploading just a weekly gag panel/Nuggets, every Sunday, save for the end-of-season jubilee of Baked Alaskas (now defunct), edits of the year, comics poetry, the rare drawing class sketch, and the occasional event promotion. FB is a messy mix of everything - not unlike me - with more interactions, and then there's this here blog - which according to a young hipster friend are making a comeback amongst the artsy demographic - is more like my personal/public space to expand upon any given topic or random deconstruction, like this very post. I suppose the poor editor who will dutifully skin over every entry in this on-line drip of commentary spanning many years will hopefully take away an overall picture, and come up with a good biography, similar to a skipping stone plunging into in-depth insight and understanding. Or, just look at all the funny pictures. Like not forgetting to stop and smell the roses, that's what it's really all about. Thanks for visiting, and now back to the proverbial drawing board...
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| Another grab showing the steadily increasing numbers |
The comedy writing technique (as opposed to the cartoon by the same name) of utilizing non sequiturs is a well known method in cartooning. It shares a lot with the closely related area of irony, and both are present in this particular panel.
As usual for a "process" post, I uploaded all the steps in creating this cartoon, from the initial doodle, which captured the initial idea, then reworking the concept into a more effective composition. The breakdown continues into penciling the panel, and then inking - including all the minute micro-tweaks (and mistakes) along the way. Finally it is scanned, edited, and digitally colored before appearing in the paper (subscription link here). Documenting these deconstructions are also useful when doing demonstrations to my drawing classes.
Speaking of which, there was an extra layer of unintended irony introduced into the piece personally when it appeared in print the very same day I just so happened to sign a contract that technically elevated me to the formal rank in academia as "professor," which was covered in more detail during yesterday's post on the subject. But it was a brief moment of meta making the moment of insight a tad bit, well, ironic. Sometimes it's the little things, like a touch of tarragon to add another layer of appreciation and awareness of the humbling connections in life. All that being said I will still carry bear spray with me in the studio, just in case.
Half a dozen years back I had to admit I was wrong in at least one instance when it came to "legacy strips" (aka zombie strips) what with the awesomeness that is now Nancy Now I gotta say it again: sorry, I stand corrected, as there's now a new recent favorite that been making my day a lot as of late: the now-fifty year old feature "Heathcliff." Also, I continue to be humbled and amazed at the breadth and depth of new stuff that is continually coming out in popular media, be it books, movies, music or art - especially in comics. It's hard to keep up especially when one's tendency is to slowly surrender to solipsism as an artist, and focus more on your own output. But as John Muir once said: "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it is attached to the rest of the world." (*Update: erroneously misattributed quote). And so staying aware of the connections that can be drawn in art is not only important for history, but as we'll see shortly, can be crucial to staying open to change and inspiration in ones own work. So let us tug at the cat tail.
The original creator of the original orange cat was George Gately, who retired in 1998, as did his assistant John Gallagher. Nowadays their nephew Peter Gallagher is in charge of cleaning the creative litterbox that is coming up with the current cat cartoons. Posted above here are the first two panels I saw of his that hooked me into following the feature: the first ("In Heat") immediately told me that, hey waitaminite, this was something else entirely different, not the least in content, and was one of the rare times I just laughed my jaded ass off. The second panel ("Hot Dogs") is when I officially fell in love with the character - that total-air body launch is one of the many endearing tropes regular readers look forward to. Others would be Jimmy the Frog, the helmet, meat tanks and gorillas etc. - as I tell new readers, just stay with it, even if it doesn't make any sense at first, or at all, as it can get delightfully surreal sometimes.
Here's a selection of interviews, one from Solrad and another from Uproxx, and in particular this "Comics Culture" video from Terence Dollard's informative channel, that give some more insight into Gallagher's process of both idea generation and making the art (including going from roughs to finished piece, techniques etc.), and his weekly workflow. He also speaks to the comparative advantages of doing a single-panel gag format, which was personally validating for me, not to mention insights coming from another established professional in the industry who also teaches at a local university). Oh and yeah, oranges.
Aside from all the this fan-boy stuff, I had a small epiphany after becoming increasingly curious as to Gallagher's usage of color, which appears, along with his linework, to be very simple. A limited and subdued palette consistently of desaturated pastels, without any cuts for contrasting value (say, like for cast shadows) or even much of a range like for example in gradations to show an object's volume, or to enhance pictorial depth. While after much study, reflection and experimentation, I don't think I could restrain myself and my coloring instincts and not employ those same techniques, but in retrospect, I have a lot to learn about restraining my tendency to make my own panels appear overworked ie too "Photoshoppy." Ironically that's what turns me off from so much if not most of contemporary color work done especially digitally, and you can imagine the horror at the sudden realization that you are actually aesthetically repelled by most of your own work. This is similar to the reaction most artists have at looking over their own material, except I'm very much effectively still right in the middle of incorporating it into my own material, as it's only been within the past few years that the ratio of color versus black & white panels has flipped, and now the vast majority of my cartoons are in full color.
One of the interesting perspectives you can gain from seeing your work displayed in a show, particularly retrospectives when everything’s up on the wall, is the cumulative gestalt experience in critiquing aspects that otherwise normally wouldn’t be noticed amidst the usual drip of daily or weekly displays of the work. You can note patterns emerging such as arrangement of compositional elements, or specifically in this instance, color usage. And compare and contrast any overall visual elements with other similar works. This is what was done in screen-grabbing swatches of Gallagher’s recent panels and comparing/contrasting his restrained color usage against what can be seen while looking at a wave of archived work on my Instagram page. And so, sigh, time again for yet another reboot - but that's pretty much the MO whenever sitting back down behind a drawing table every day anyway. Back to the proverbial litterbox.
Note that this is a slightly different screen-grab than the similar one recent appearing on the "Teaching Teaser" post from a few weeks ago. The key difference is in flowchart down the right-hand side of the screen that indicates that the progression of the paperwork for this course (and also in tandem with the Beginning level, ART 220) has now moved from off the desk of the Provost, bearing their signature, and will now at long last appear in the catalog for the fall semester of 2024. Hence the absence of any link to registration for direct enrollment into the class, but it's now just a matter of time for the finishing touches and it becomes formally added to the official UAF catalog as a legitimate part of the College of Liberal Art curriculum in the Department of Art. More after the jump...
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| "Come gather 'round" - The Buffet of Awesomesauce |
Tomorrow will mark fifteen years of posting punny pics + accompanying cartoon commentary. Thought I'd take a moment to say thank you to the regular readers, I always appreciate the eyeballs.
Made way back in 2016 during a Visual Art Academy course, this one-pager piece was done as a demo for the Cartoon & Comic Arts class. It was initially conceived on the spot as an emergency last-minute backup to the in-class exercise for our week-long “collaborative page” unit. This is when I orchestrate a section of the course for getting a taste of a more traditional team approach to creating comics: one student does a script for a one-page, 3-5 panel comic, then a second randomly selected student will in turn pencil the page out, followed by a third and fourth student respectively inking then coloring what turns into a really neat amalgamation of talent and skill. This particular demo page laid around the office a number of years before scanning it last year,
and then it again randomly resurfaced on a search of my desktop for an
unrelated image. I just used it to warm up for some other coloring work, and so can now show it in the studio classroom to illustrate the full process. A note that the selected excerpt is sampled from a particularly appropriate piece by poet Tom Hubbard, and the other two stages sketched/inked by a couple of amazing former students Tara and Amanda, both incredible artists in their own right these days.
On another side-note soon I'll hopefully have some exceptional news to share with folks about a long-held dream coming true. It follows on a recent ascension in the academic ranks to the degree that one of my official duties is creating not just artwork, or art majors, but curriculum development as well. The posted pics are snapshots from the studio classroom when we move from experimenting with comics poetry into the sequential art/comics portion of the semester: the buffet of sample comics on the main display table in the center of the studio, and the ever-growing pile of sample student comics from previous semesters.
Relatedly, here's another example of the particular effectiveness in this medium with of one of the many in-class exercises I frequently use in the studio to demonstrate how to guide a viewer/reader through a sequence of images that transport us on a journey through time and space itself. "Behold the power of comics!"
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| (Living the dream) |
I normally don’t ever promote my own work to students taking my classes: aside from the opening show & tell, I only demo my stuff during the pen + ink portion of the course, and then a couple open studio sessions of sitting alongside everyone else that is working on their pages for the comic art critique (technically it's triple-dipping when you use the right pen).
During an Advanced level though, the expectations are different. A primary assumption is that by the time you are at that level, you A) know how to draw, and B) want to draw (and C) will draw). This becomes important during a stacked class session, which necessitates juggling multiple needs, for example the 6-week summer session Drawing classes which will have varying numbers of students at each level: Beginning, Intermediate, Advanced, and on occasion, Graduate (though you are of course only paid for teaching one class – and don’t even get me started on when it was assumed you’d also be running an additional online component).
So more often than not due to the overwhelming majority of folks enrolled in the Beginning level, the majority of the course revolves around them. Generally speaking if I haven’t had them before in Beginning, I’ll essentially run the Intermediates in tandem by doing similar works (ensuring they have a solid command of various media and demonstrating their understanding of linear perspective, composition, use of line and value etc.). Lastly the Advanced orbit around us coming in to lead weekly critiques and reviews of assignments. They set the bar, as more often than not, they will also be art majors (or minoring at the least), if not B.F.A. candidates themselves - and so cycling back around to the opening of this post, expectations are set correspondingly higher. Thus they are ultimately entrusted with a largely self-directed, contract-driven course, and possess the discipline and drive to complete a "cohesive body of work," usually twelve pieces completed over the six-week session, so approximately two pieces a week. This is lengthened to approximately one piece per week over the course of a normal 15-week semester.
Now mounting these trophy heads up on the wall is neither a humblebrag nor throwing shade to shame, it is simply a stark lesson and definitive evidence that twelve pieces over a fifteen-week semester is simply not too much to ask. I repeatedly emphasize to all of my students, I never expect them to do anything that I can't and/or won't also do myself. So before the last couple weeks of the semester leading up into finals, I oftentimes (dependent on the level of instructor dissatisfaction at their collective class output) display the completion of double what I ask for in their portfolios. Note that these for the most part are additionally digitally colored, and this display omits any freelance gigs or "fine art"or requisite sketches. Also note that this is also why I am absolutely fucking fried most of the time. And not coincidentally now understand why most full-time faculty rarely if ever get around to working on their own stuff most of the year when classes are in session - it's almost impossible to burn the candle at both ends and not expect to see some slippage, mentally or otherwise. To say nothing of the dream that one day 100% could be devoted towards, say, making another book, or any number of other items bubbling away on the back-burners. Every so often I'll wonder to myself what life would be like if I wasn't teaching and instead spent a comparable number of hours cartooning, behind a drawing table instead of in front of a class.
Now aside from the usual slacker (like a certain someone), or a student who has taken on too much (under-appreciating the sheer number of hours required of multiple studio art courses often trips folks up), or the inevitable situation where shit just happens, I still maintain it's entirely reasonable to expect folks to keep up, and make a lot of drawings for homework, at least one every single weekend, at least. But for me, there is a very real acknowledgement that to maintain a constant, consistent stream of creation, the challenge for most is time management, learning the logistics is almost as crucial as any skillset. I know for a fact that having other classes, and/or a job, a relationship, a life - will invariably force you into the choices you need to make to foster the discipline it takes, to commit to investing in the time to put in the practice and get the work done. All this is to say "Why yes, you most certainly can do only half the work, just make sure it's twice as good."
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| (the previous semester's output) |
A very interesting perspective on my own cartoons as I had somehow missed this little gem despite numerous readings over many years of both Scott McCloud and Art Spiegelman’s work. Recently read a piece in The New Yorker magazine on a new biography of Ernie Bushmiller (the creator of Nancy) written by the cartoonist Bill Griffith (the creator of Zippy the Pinhead). Reviewers Mouly & Bormes write the following observation:
For modern-day cartoonists, Bushmiller’s “Nancy” has long represented the essence of the distillation inherent in comics. As Scott McCloud related in Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, “Art Spiegelman explains how a drawing of three rocks in a background scene was Ernie’s way of showing us there were some rocks in the background. It was always three. Why? Because two rocks wouldn’t be ‘some rocks.’ Two rocks would be a pair of rocks. And four rocks was unacceptable because four rocks would indicate ‘some rocks’ but it would be one rock more than was necessary to convey the idea of ‘some rocks.’ ”
I’ve long assumed my penchant for always drawing these hallmark black spruce trees (and also to some extent bubbles and nuggets) in threes was based on a subconscious - and as it turns out, erroneous - misremembering of the phrase the “rule of thirds” as the "rule of threes.” The funny little growths have always been primarily a quick technique to establish either a midground or background, so as to enhance depth on the picture plane. They also serve as a simple, bold and graphic way to add some spot black for contrast – as a side-note I still employ the same twig pruned from a tree outside the drawing studio for a drawing class taken over thirty years ago to fittingly draw said trees. As evidenced by any cursory examination of any one of my omnipresent sketchbooks, this definitely plays out across so many of my panels… I could have trolled across any number of them, but limited these posted samples from just flipping through the current one, and didn’t even bother to start sampling finished/published panels in the archives.
Really it’s like extending the rule of threes into the realm of visual art, as it’s traditionally more of a storytelling trope (“three is the smallest number required to create then diverge from a pattern”), and also used for emphasizing political points in speechwriting and for comedy. Not that I have ever put much stock in such aesthetic woo, as they tend to more prove a point of confirmation bias than any legitimate theory, such as the myth of the Golden Ratio. Still an interesting exercise, and there is a kernel of practicality, since, to quote my wife, humans are instinctively wired to look for symmetry, and offsetting such a tendency towards basic pattern recognition is a way to create a more visually interesting composition.
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| Demonstrating the problem |
This probably may seem somewhat like pole-vaulting over a moose turd, but it was - still is in fact - an interesting speed bump. Especially given my longevity in the field you'd think this potential issue would have been addressed if not at least noticed before. But an innocuous comment by an editor (teased out back in a December post) alerted me to a different perspective on my work that had never occurred to me before, nor had it ever been pointed out.
Very humbling to discover it's possible to misinterpret a common feature, the eyes and eyelids, that I use on all of my characters. Specifically in the half-closed position ie with the lid halfway down the eye). What for all these years I thought was a really simple thing to "get" - namely that that expression meant that the character's semi-closed were not at half-mast, relaxed, sleepy, sedated etc. It's supposed to show that the eyes are in fact closed completely. If they were halfway then yes, like the posted examples illustrate, there would indeed be dots.
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| Before and after comparison of coloring in the white part |
Not, as it turns out according to about half the folks randomly polled about the potential problem, like a zombie, because I forgot to include the little dots at the heart of the cartoon googly eye.
Here's a suit of samples, ending here with a before/after example treatment on one set, another series of salmon showing the new matched skin-tone shading, and another new set being modeled on the mug of a moose. So the solution for now is to tone the upper half a shade darker than the base, and conversely lighten the lower. As long as the the color white is removed it'll be obvious that the character's eyes are closed completely.
