Cartoon practice

(did I mention how much I love the library?)

Once again, I am foiled by a simple (so I thought) exercise from a library book. (NOT the book’s fault, I hasten to add).

Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti is nothing if not opinionated. It isn’t even that old (2007/2011) but it is full of thou shalts and shalt nots… It is also full of good advice and a ton of exercises, so I plunged in to see what nuggets I could glean and apply to my project.

Simplify, simplify, simplify was the early message - so I played around with a couple of people built using basic shapes.

(This, btw, felt a whole lot more playful and light than the mini-zine Some Things My Father Taught Me from the other day… that effort took more out of me than I thought and is the reason why I wound up skipping yesterday altogether).

Another exercise from early in the book was to draw a bunch of cars as quickly as possible, capturing the essence of ‘car’ with a few simple lines.

With each car, I was supposed to draw faster until I could whip off a vehicle in 5 seconds or less. That didn’t go so well. I had another one of those moments where I realized I had never seen a car before and had no idea how to draw them - with or without details.

From there, the author boldly suggested I repeat this exercise with castles and telephones.

Gamely, I attempted some super quick/don’t think too hard castles…

They all sort of ran one into the next and were generally a mess… However, that did lead me to think of how, as a child, I would have given anything to live in a castle. And, how reality is a daydream-crusher.

Then I remembered the day in Spain when Dad arrived at a hostel, exhausted after another long day of labouring up and down one hill after another. He unpacked his sketchbook, sat down at a table at the local café bar, and doodled this:

Sigh. Let today’s post stand as an example that the ability to draw is not a matter of genetics. That said, if you go back to my early page of truly dreadful cats, the cars perhaps reflect a modicum of improvement? Hang on… let me dig the cats out…

I can’t leave you with those feeble felines as the last images you see…

I’ll turn the newsletter back over to Dad and another page from one of his sketchbooks…

I’m not sure what he was working on here… but finding it made me smile.

Anyone want to toss a caption for that my way? Post your suggestions in the comments…

And, for subscribers, you now have access to the community chat. We are sharing our cartoon selves - feel free to contribute! In the chat thread you can upload an image (which, for some reason, isn’t possible in the comments after a post/newsletter).