Unfinished Cartoon #1

This is what one of my cartoons looks like after about an hour’s work.

Normally I come up with a caption first and then do the drawing, but sometimes I like to start with a drawing just as a change of pace.

This is a cartoon without a caption after two sessions of about 20-30 minutes each. So far this is just graphite pencil on bristol board.

Yesterday, in the first session, I put in the pencil rules for the caption area and sketched in a rough layout of the features and light/dark areas. This morning, in a second session, I deepened the dark areas and fine-tuned the features a little bit.

I’ll probably do one more session with only graphite, fixing the features quite a bit. The neck, nose and eyes don’t look quite right yet. And I’ll take the dark areas much further down, to almost black, using graphite and a stump.

Then I’ll do a session laying in colors roughly, using some combination of crayon, soft pastel, hard pastel and colored pencils. Then another session rendering the colors more fully, trying to kinda/sorta approach the look of acrylic without actually using a liquid medium with brushes. Then a final session with anything handy, tweaking everything into a final cartoon.

I can put the caption in at any time along the way. First I pencil the letters, then ink them with a Pigma marker. I’m not really happy with the look of a marker for lettering. But I just don’t have the energy to use a dip pen. That’s the look I like, but I need to find a way to achieve it without actually doing it. (Come to think of it, that’s a problem I have in many areas of my life...)

This stage is one of my favorite parts of drawing. Things are far from perfect, far from finished, but part of me would be happy to stop here. It already “looks” like what I want the finished image to look like and from now on every touch I make to the bristol board I’m going to be nervous about making sure that I take the image further but don’t “lose” the look I’ve already achieved.

One of the coolest thing about having computers and scanners is that a 300dpi scan of a rough like this pretty much makes sure that even if I screw up completely going to a final, this rough will never be lost completely.

*

Too bad we can’t scan ourselves, save ourselves as roughs and then if we fuck up our life, just go back to an earlier version...

*

Oh, as soon as I typed “scan ourselves” I remembered a cool song about scanning ourselves:

Here at Laughing Pines
Where the party never ends
There's a spicy new attraction
On the Funway
You can scan yourself
For traces of old heartaches
The details of desire

Shimmering, shimmering . . .

Yowie! - It's Connie Lee
At the wheel of her Shark-de-Ville
We're cruising at about a thousand miles an hour
But the car is standing still
So good to hear that crazy laugh
To hear her whisper, 'Hold me tight!'
To learn to love all over again
On that warm wet April night

    Swing out
    To Lake Nostalgia
    Route 5 to Laughing Pines
    Get off at Funway West
    Drive into Springtime
    Drive into Springtime

Easter Break - '66
A shack on Cape Sincere
Mad Mona baking gospel candy
It was a radical year
We get a little silly
And fall into microspace
It's even better this time around
With Coltrane on the K.L.H.

    Swing out
    To Lake Nostalgia
    Route 5 to Laughing Pines
    Get off at Funway West
    Drive into Springtime
    Drive into Springtime

It's you and me honey, in a crowded booth
At the Smokehouse in the Sand
I'm dragging out some bad old gag
When you touch my hand
At 4 a.m. we go out of this place
You look absurdly sweet
We hike downtown to Avenue A
Like we own the street

    Swing out
    To Lake Nostalgia
    Route 5 to Laughing Pines
    Get off at Funway West
    Drive into Springtime
    Drive into Springtime