I did a talk on cartooning yesterday at my local public library. Instead of going through the usual stuff like the type of pencil I use, I chose to share the lessons I learned as a cartoonist… lessons learned the hard way.
This is what I handed out. Feel free to apply it to what you do.
I pawed through some archives and managed to fill the collage out a bit more. I’ve added years 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2004. In addition, I’ve added the year to each image to make it a bit more viewer friendly. Some of these are not “actual” self portraits…in that, they may have been done for a strip or an illustration… but the evolution still holds.
To me, these images are more telling than photos. Sure, a photo can convey some emotion, but a photo can’t tell me about line. For example: 1999. The lines used on that portrait are pretty uniform. There is some hatching in the hair and beard but for the most part the lines are tentative. There is nothing that I was sure about in drawing that. In fact, maybe by not getting into detail, I was hiding something. What that something may have been isn’t too clear.
2000 finds me confused. Am I supposed to be doing this?
2001 makes it seem as though I was happy… if only for a brief moment. I’m not absolutely certain of when in 2001 this was drawn, but it’s a same bet to assume it was before September.
Between 2005 and 2008 and possibly into 2009 I’m trying to figure out who I was not only as a person but as an artist. Am I supposed to be a cartoonist or so I want to be a “fine artist”? This was the period where I was living in a tight rope… my marriage was starting and ending, life changed for me… grad school and a new life. New life means a new face and int he process, trying to figure out what the old face was.
By 2010, with an MFA on my wall, I had myself all figured out. Sort of.
Wonder what the next 20 will look like.
I will try and fill the gaps in this collage as I find them. 1993, 1996-1998 and 2002.
It has taken me a long time to get to where I am… wherever ‘where’ is. I’ve gone through a few forests of paper and pencils, swimming pools full of ink and rejection after rejection after rejection to definitively know that… I do not know. On a normal week, I draw a minimum of 20-25 cartoons. That’s not including sketches, separate side projects or the ones I end up trashing… that’s 20 from pencil to ink to Photoshop. So give or take a few hundred, i draw about 1,040 cartoons per year. The economic law of supply vs. demand says that if the supply is high, the demand is low… meaning that the market value of the supply is low.
Does this mean that the value of my drawings is low? I am not suggesting that I turn out more material than anyone else… far from it. I know I don’t. If anyone out there knows me personally, you know I am not one to boast or brag. (Besides, who would really care other than another cartoonist about my output volume?) I’m sure there are cartoonists out there that routinely get 20-25 finished cartoons done in an afternoon.
This is what approximately one year of daily Bob the Squirrel strips (left) and about a year of Sunday Bob the Squirrel panels (right) look like in my well ventilated storage facility.
This is what 15 months of SQUIRRELOSOPHY panels look like…keeping in mind that nearly 60 panels have been sold.
There was a time when I myself put little value into what I do. Like… two days ago. Once the drawing was done, scanned and sent, it was out of my mind and I stopped thinking about it. You really have to. If you stop to dwell on each piece (being a daily cartoonist) you will fall so far behind you might as well be standing still. That mindset lent itself to me not caring about the finished product. It wasn’t until recently I felt the need to re-examine this process… like… two days ago. And all it took was kinda sorta hearing my own words coming out of someone’s mouth for me to change.
I was asked for a copy of something I worked very hard on. No thought from the other party of any kind of compensation for me and my work. My ‘reward’ came in knowing that my work would be used on someone’s project. I should be honored that they thought my work was good enough to ask for. Really? Honored? I almost wish I wasn’t asked and they just stole it. That way, I wouldn’t have been so dumbstruck by the audacity asking me point blank if they could have it took.
I assume you know how this story ended. This person did not get what they were asking for. In their not getting what they wanted, I got something I didn’t think I needed. It was another lever of pride in what I do… that no matter what, there IS value in what I create. If the cartoonist/illustrator/artist can’t see the value inherent in his/her own work, why should anyone else think or see value in it?
I had this feeling once. I developed it while working on my MFA. As grad students, we were constantly poked and prodded by critiques to explain why we did this or why we did that. Why would you use that mark to express that feeling? Why that color? Why that choice? Why that choice? By the end of my graduate work, I was a bear defending its young. The day before graduation, the faculty gathered my class together for an exit strategy meeting. We went around the room and told each other the one thing that surprised us about the program and what it did for us as artists. I said, “I am surprised at how deeply, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ like I have fallen in love with my line…the mark I make on a piece of paper which defines me…I would do anything for that line, defend it with every ounce of blood in my body. Everything else can be taken from me but that line is mine all mine.”
Okay, I know… it’s a little corny… but after those two hard years of work, in a constant defensive stance on my work, that’s what I felt. It has been three years now since I made that little statement. Obviously, some of that passion was lost since… in the day-to-day struggle to get new work out there, new eyeballs on that work and seeking new eyeballs for the work you have done and the work you will do. It took that person asking me for something to get that passion back.
It has been said that something is only worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it.
Considering all that I’ve paid in getting to this point, I’d say it’s worth a whole lot.