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The first research method I undertook in order to answer my initial question was a form of repeated, habitual messy practice.

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This experience was my favourite of all the research I took part in, and I think was perhaps also the most rewarding. Without knowing, initially, where to begin, I turned to an online 12-day doodling challenge as a guide (linked below). However, after a few days I found that these small challenges weren't enough, and I began to give myself more freedom in my doodling experimentations. Most of my doodles are abstract, some are just entire pages experimenting with line and shading, and some are more fully-realized images or scenes. While learning about specific aspects of sketching, I made collage pages full of inspiration and information regarding each of these, and I turned back to these pages often to inform my sketches. I also took my journal with me out into the world so I was able to draw on the spot, while actually looking at the thing (or person, or place) I was trying to represent. Some places I went to sketch were the park in my neighbourhood, to the shore of the water downtown where I live, and to the field down the road from my house.

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12-Day Doodle Challenge Prompts

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Take the 12-day Journal Doodle Challenge to unlock your creative superpowers! The only way to get out of a creative funk is to experiment! This 12-day journal doodle challenge will add some much-needed variety to your planning routine.
Do you Bullet Journal? Do you enjoy doodles or doodling? If you said yes to either one of those questions, then this challenge is perfect for you! The idea of this challenge is to get you experiencing doodling so that you can incorporate doodles into your Bullet Journal or planner. Doodles are a great way to destress and to add a beautiful touch to your notes!

How to Participate: Journal Doodle Challenge

There really isn't any guide for participation in this challenge except to give each day's theme a shot. You never know what kind of doodling you like until you've tried them! This challenge is a 12-day challenge with 12 different doodle themes. You are not restricted to doodling in your journal, though this is encouraged.

Be creative, don't restrict yourself to one set of pens-use pencils, pens, gel pens, brush pens, paint, micro-liners, permanent marker-use anything you want!

Day 1: Simple Doodle

Day one is a simple doodle, so keep it simple today. The simple doodle is meant to ease you into doodling. It can be any size or color, but try to stay away from too much detailing or the use of several colors.

Day 2: Fun Doodle

Day two is the fun doodle. Fun is pretty subjective, so doodle something you find fun! Use fun colors, fun pens (see how much fun we're having!), be crazy, think out of the box. There are NO guides to this doodle, LET LOOSE!

Day 3: Abstract Doodle

Day three is the abstract doodle. Use weird shapes, lines, and colors to create an abstract piece of art. There are no size or color limits for day three.

Day 4: Small Doodle

For day four's doodle, keep it little. This doodle should not take up too much space on your page. Other than size, do whatever you'd like with this doodle! Use any combination of colors, shapes, inspirations, or tools that you want.

Day 5: Big Doodle

Now that we have completed the little doodle let's do a BIG doodle today! This doodle should take up a larger portion of the page, utilizing all that extra white space. This doodle could even take up a whole page!

Day 6: Colorful Doodle

For day six we are breaking out the rainbow! Use your most colorful tools and use as many colors as you can! This doodle can be big, small, abstract, neat-anything so long as it is colorful!

Day 7: Black and White Doodle

Now that you've utilized color let's utilize black and white. Restrict day seven's doodle to the use of black ink on white paper. This doodle can be any size, detailed, or simple. This detail could be an object or abstract. Utilize the elegance of black and white.

Day 8: Animal Doodle

Let your creativity free and doodle your favorite animal today! Use any of the doodle types we have already practiced.

Day 9: Plant Doodle

I LOVE plants, so I decided to dedicate day nine to plants. Use the skills you've already practiced to create a lovely plant doodle.

Day 10: Quote Doodle

Regardless of what you may think, words can be doodles too. Pick out your favorite word or quote and doodle it today. Use a variety of fonts, colors, letter sizing, and pens.

Day 11: Stationery Doodle

Since you are most likely a fan of planners, pens, and stationery, let's doodle some stationery today. Pick up your favorite pen or notebook and doodle it in your bullet journal for day eleven!

Day 12: Favorite Doodle

Last, but certainly not least, it's your turn to choose! Pick your favorite theme from the previous challenge days and follow the rules for that day! Mine was the plant doodle, so I have doodled another plant!

12-Day Journal Doodle Challenge to Supercharge Your Creativity

You can print the image below...Or better yet, Pin it to your favorite journaling board! You can cycle through the challenge as much as you want, but don't be afraid to take risks. That's how creativity grows... Now that you've had fun with your doodles, start incorporating them into your regular Bullet Journal routine!

It's your turn to share! How do you use doodles or art in your planning routine? Do they play a central role in your journaling, or are doodles just for fun? Comment below to share your pearls of wisdom.

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12-Day Journal Doodle Challenge to Supercharge Your Creativity | Page Flutter

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Take the 12-day Journal Doodle Challenge to unlock your creative superpowers! The only way to get out of a creative funk is to experiment! This 12-day journal doodle challenge will add some much-needed variety to your planning routine. Do you Bullet Journal? Do you enjoy doodles or doodling?

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My 12-day doodles:

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Using primarily the free online website Sketchpad 5.0 (click the loading image below to enter the linked website), I spent time experimenting with online digital image creation. I found it very difficult to control my lines and maintain symmetry, however working online allowed me to utilize helpful tools such as crop, copy, and paste to create repetition, and experiment with different drawing tools such as calligraphy pens and paint brushes.

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While researching different cartoonists for the "interview" aspect of my inquiry, I came across Henry McCarthy who said that he began drawing stories using post-it note flip books. I remembered making these as a child, and realized that the slow and gradual changes to the images said a lot about narrative building and character progression. This proved to be a harder task than I remembered, and my results are fairly childish and simple as it was difficult to create synchronicity on such a small surface. Regardless, this activity taught me about how quickly a story can be revealed. You see the movements of the animations quickly, sometimes only in fragments, in a way that forces the person watching to fill in the blanks and help to create the narrative.

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To get a better feel of the different kind of visual art that could be useful to a story, I collected different potential drawing materials from around my house, from outside, and bought a few fine-tip pens that were recommended to me at a local art store. Using ink and paint, I tried to create different motions, textures, and depths on the page. Using natural objects from outside, such as a pinecone or a leaf, I was reminded of the fact that visual storytelling has been one of the oldest means of portraying information for human beings. Combining the ecosystem that I live within into my art was a spiritual experience - I felt less like an artist and more like a translator for the plants. I felt them guide me more forcefully than a pen or a pencil does, in the way that their forms worked so poignantly on the page. This was a reminder that, although we have a degree of control over our art, in the end it wants to live and breathe on it's own, without our input.

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Having found an old stencil art book in my cupboards, I tried my hand at copying a couple stencils. While this mode of drawing isn't common for cartoonists as it takes away a lot of the artist's individual expression, I found it helpful as a beginner's tool. While copying stencils, I got into a kind of trance with my flowing lines that was almost meditative. It was also incredibly satisfying to see my lines grow and expand into a recognizable figure, and it made me realize how good the trained human eye is at picking up form and meaning from something relatively abstract or imperfect.

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I tried my hand at following along to some of cartoonist Lynda Barry's tutorial drawing videos on Youtube. With this method of research, I learned a lot about the lack of rules that apply to cartooning; there is no right way to draw a story. Her approach to drawing is based on play, fun and humour. She also always starts her sketches off very simply, and then goes back to them and adds in detail slowly. This is similar to the way I tend to construct my stories, and brought a sense of editing to the sketching practice that I hadn't seen or though about before.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILhhxTwgty8

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsoEydHVF5w

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipWUvhsTth8&t=268s

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The second research method I undertook was a mix of observation, traditional research, and attempted fact-gathering.

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Over the past three weeks I have read three separate graphic novels (two bought online, and one rented as a hard copy). I think it's worth noting that I had never read this style before, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed each of these books. They all deal with relatively dark and mature subject matter, and turn to visual aids to make this material more digestible and yet more thought-provoking. The 3 styles of drawing are very different, and I noted these differences and what they brought to the stories below.

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Autobiographical narrative on her experience in Iran as a young girl.

All in black and white, simplistic, almost child-like images

Satrapi uses abstract & symbolic imagery to represent how the traumas and atrocities she is dealing with as her subject matter are experienced emotionally, particularly when they are filtered through the a characters memories & imagination

She constantly uses self-portraits to illustrate the process of identity formation & visualize the split b/w public & private identities (which is particularly profound for her experience as an Iranian woman)

The power of the graphic novel, for me, seems to really comes from the contrast b/w the horrific events it describes, & the very abstract & simplified way in which those events are drawn

According to Satrapi, her style was influenced by 4 main sources:

Persian miniatures & murals in which perspective is flattened (she tried to integrate both Eastern & Western art forms into her novel to relate to her diasporic identity)

Woodcuts of French artist Felix Vallotton

German expressionist cinema

Beauchard’s “Epileptic” graphic novel, from which she borrowed the technique of symbolic representation. In “Epilipetic”, Beauchard represents his brother’s illness in the image of a monster. Satrapi uses this technique as well, by representing something abstract (ie. evil) through a symbol (snake)

In my interpretation, her drawing style has 4 main goals:

Amplify meaning through simplification, which emphasizes certain elements & their importance

Mitigate the effects of graphic violence: allows readers to understand & sympathize with traumatic events presented, while also protecting them from the trauma by introducing more critical & aesthetic distance

Reflect a childlike understanding of the world

Illustrate the imperfections of memory (the story is meant to be highly subjective and she wants her readers aware of this, and so is not focused on perfect representation, but on emotionally true representations of how the memories remain with her and what they mean to her now)

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It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth 

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It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth 

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Semi-autobiographical narrative on his life as a middle-aged cartoonist, his obsession with collecting comic books, his delusions about the past and his journey to find a cartoonist he becomes interested in.

He uses many wordless panels, which seem to convey a sense of observational detachment & isolation. Often entire pages go by without any words, which helps to convey the idea that his character is lost in thought, or detached from his surroundings, as if watching the world from a safe distance.

The parallel combinations of words & images illustrate connections between past & present, as well as internal & external experiences. There are sequences in which words & images are entirely separate & unrelated to one another, but they both somehow influence the meaning of the other through their juxtaposition; they act on one another and affect the way we as readers interpret both.

This shows how the exploration of an external landscape can facilitate the exploration of an internal landscape - such as when the main character visits his childhood home, he is exploring his old house, while also exploring his childhood memories within his own internal mind.

Also used to illustrate the interconnection b/w past & present, because these different streams of information allow events from different time periods to overlap with one another. They are never totally separate, but bleeding into one another.

Moment-to-moment transitions are used to slow down the narrative & convey the idea of reflection & contemplation

Slowness of narrative helps to convey the characters difficulties with moving forward; he often seems trapped in a kind of temporal stasis, as if time is standing still for him, or he is trying to make it so. This technique makes the story more contemplative and immersive

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Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth by Chris Ware

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Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth by Chris Ware

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Semi-autobiographical narrative on his experience growing up without his father, meeting him once, and all the intergenerational trauma that is associated with this complicated relationship. The narrative cuts back and forth from his storyline to an earlier one, in which his grandfather is a young boy, also dealing with fatherly issues of abandonment and abuse.

The story is a mix of fantasy and reality, yet Ware doesn’t use any conventional methods of identifying fantasy sequences (ie. wavy borders or though balloons), which often makes it difficult to tell when something is really happening or when it’s just a fantasy. This brings another dimension to his representations, as they go past the literal to also speak about the metaphorical and aesthetic, and this genre-bending seems to be one of the powers and abilities of comics.

Flat drawing style: his mages are flat, dead, & mechanical, acting like a pictorial language (same edges and density as lettering would have)

His characters are defiantly anti-expressive; images are rendered in a minimal number of very hard, perfectly even & perfectly straight or curved lines. Doing research, I found that Ware says that he prefers this style b/c it allows him to reduce every image to it’s essential meaning (wouldn’t be possible with realistic images)

Allows him to represent the subtleties of human emotion, which wouldn’t be clear with realistic images

Ex. facial expressions are not exact replicants of feeling/emotions (especially with adults). The faces of his characters often appear expressionless, as if they are trying to conceal their feelings, but Ware claims this actually provides a more effective way of presenting those feelings (this reminds me of Satrapi’s similar reasoning for why she uses simplistic images to convey complicated emotions or issues).

Use of colour: Ware primarily uses colour to distinguish b/w historical periods (like the 1890s and 1980s), because each period has a different colour scheme which is supposed to convey a different atmosphere (Ex. 1890s: represent sepia tones of old photographs). Yet, he also uses colour to underscore the emotional content of an image (dark vs light blue washed backgrounds).

Ware also uses moment-to-moment transitions in which the lapse of time b/w panels is very small, almost nothing (similar to Seth’s style in It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken)

Deliberately strives to slow-down the experience of reading - “there is a staccato quality to comics that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to telling something more understated, so I had to slow that down & smooth it out”

Primarily tries to capture micro-aggressions/micro-gestures (ie. the steps a character takes to cross a room); he tends to represent every single movement in order to make time pass as slowly as possible. This slow pace can be used to express the boredom or frustration of characters, but also to capture the complexity of their internal lives, which are often complex compared to their outward lives/external actions. In other words, by slowing down the narrative, he’s able to go deeper into their internal thought process.

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I watched two different movies that each explore visual storytelling in different ways. While watching, I kept a notepad with me so I could jot down things that pertained to my research (the most relevant are included below). Through this observational method I learned a little bit about the cartooning industry, but in a greater way I learned about the similarities in film and comic books as they both rely on visuals to create atmosphere and progress narratives. In both of these movies, the dialogue is second to the images.

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The main character Harvey Pekar (who is also the narrator) talks in comic panels, in the sense that he only speaks in important sentences. The last thing he says always acts as a shift, or is the most important. In this way, his sentences are doing the same work as his visuals: they are short, snappy, and revealing.

He always “listens”, or eavesdrops, to things going on around him and picks up on these little important moments and sayings - one’s that could be easily captured in his mind like an image if he had a photographic memory. All of these moments work to speak on something (an idea) larger than themselves, and in this way act as precious particles, even if they are relatively simple or mundane.

This movie makes me think of graphic narratives as the land in between novels and movies - they don’t necessarily need the fast-pace movement or complete context of a film, but they can also control the viewer’s focus in a way that the novel sometimes struggles with. It also made me see how a story that played out like a sketch could possibly be made of an arrangement of simple moments, each being quick and stark and telling their own narrative, with them all coming together in the end to create a narrative world.

The personal life of Pekar is also relevant as it sheds light on the small financial gains that cartooning usually entails (unless working for a large corporation, like Marvel). While to everyone else he is "famous" and considered very successful, this doesn't transfer over to the amount of money he has or the ease of his life.

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The images in this film move in the same way the music does, accelerating and slowing down based on what is happening at each point in the narrative. It’s clear that movements are exaggerated as they are one of the main story-telling techniques being used, and colour is paramount for creating scene and mood.

3 different kind of pictures being created, using the music soundtrack as inspiration:

The kind that tells a linear, clear story

The kind that doesn’t tell such a clear story but paints a definite picture

The kind which is completely abstract

Images tend to morph into others almost in the same way sentences can flow into each other. These sometimes seemingly random pictures become fabricated all together into a kind of tale that the viewer helps create by meaning-making and by inferring details based on what comes before and after each image, or the specific order arrangement

In this way, placement is paramount. In terms of sketching, this makes me think about an images relationship to the ones being displayed on preceding and following pages, as well an images placement on the page (there is a different meaning to an image that appears alongside the entire left margin of a paragraph, versus one that is shoved down in the bottom right-hand corner of a page)

Film begins without animation, only sound, and then this becomes transferred into something we can see visually: animation. Forms begin to manifest slowly, in a trend of dark to light that begins to show a world springing forth.

There seems to be a link between the inspiration behind a visual (in this case an orchestra creating music), and the pictures that flow from it (again, in this case they are flowing, colourful and largely abstract).

This makes me think about the act of creating an ecosystem for our stories to live in, through visuals and imagery; this is a slow, gradual process that is continuing enriched and built upon. By the end of the film, the animals, creatures and characters being depicted are much more realized and detailed and appear to have more intelligent thought and individual control - in this sense, the entire film is a narrative on character building, using small, seemingly unimportant or nonsensical moments and scenes to give hints on the way these characters look, move, think, play and ultimately evolve.

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Fantasia 2000 - Original Theatrical Trailer

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Due to the current, pandemic state we are living in, it was hard to visit actual exhibits (any that were close to where I live were not running). However, I found that virtual galleries were available for me to "walk through" online. I attended one that was taking place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and one that was happening (online) in my hometown, showcasing local artists. While scrolling through their art, I took notes on the things that stuck out to me in terms of how they were doing the work of storytelling. I found Saunder's work especially inspiring as she felt like the sort of person my character might be. Her art was complex and amazing, but it had a sort of adolescent feel to it that related to the unprofessional status my character holds.

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Louise Lawler's Tracings at the Museum of Modern Art

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Louise Lawler's Tracings at the Museum of Modern Art

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Louise Lawler's work looks at the lives of artworks in museums, private collections, gallery backrooms, storage spaces, and auction houses, examining how meaning changes with different types of displays. She continuously re-presents, reframes, or restages her works, and revisits her own pictures by transferring them to different formats, making her photographs into paperweights, tracing drawings, and works she calls "adjusted to fit" (images stretched or expanded to fit where they are displayed).

The tracings are black-and-white line versions of her photographs of places where art is shown and experienced. To produce them, Lawler worked with artist and children's book illustrator Jon Buller. A selection was shown in large-scale versions at MoMA in her 2017 exhibition WHY PICTURES NOW, which I curated with Kelly Sidley.

In this time of isolation, Lawler has made 12 of these images available for children and adults of all ages to print and use as coloring sheets. This gesture comes from the artist's interest in the way art can reach viewers beyond the museum and gallery system, and can playfully contribute to personal creative transformation. We encourage you to post and tag your colored drawings #DrawingwithMoMA on social media, and we will share a selection on our channels.

Click on the images below and print, or download all 12 as a PDF. Looking for more? We're not the only museum sharing art coloring resources.

Learn more about WHY PICTURES NOW in the video below, as Roxana Marcoci discusses How to See Louise Lawler.

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Louise Lawler's Tracings for You | Magazine

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Louise Lawler's work looks at the lives of artworks in museums, private collections, gallery backrooms, storage spaces, and auction houses, examining how meaning changes with different types of displays.

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- Detailed sketches and outlines of objects, people and scenes
- Perfect lines and repetition: create a calming effect
- Large open or blank spaces: leaving room for the reader/viewer to fill in gaps and help create the story/image
- Difference/contrast between background and foreground images to control a viewer’s focus while also creating a scene and telling a larger story
- Images inside images: almost works like metaphor or simile, in that the images that are blending into each other or are cutting each other off are influencing the others and revealing something/saying something about them that was not immediately realized - this creates relationship and depth

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Ainsley Brinn Saunder's Graphics at the Collingwood Art Crawl 

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Ainsley Brinn Saunder's Graphics at the Collingwood Art Crawl 

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Collingwood Art Crawl | Collingwood, Ontario

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Ainsley is a 21-year-old artist with a passion for character design and storytelling through visual details. They have been drawing for over a decade and hopes their passion and hard work will turn into a career some day soon. All drawings showcased have been drawn using Procreate on a iPad Pro and using an Apple Pencil.

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Ainsley Brinn Saunders | Collingwood Art Crawl | Collingwood, Ontario

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Ainsley is a 21-year-old artist with a passion for character design and storytelling through visual details. They have been drawing for over a decade and hopes their passion and hard work will turn into a career some day soon. All drawings showcased have been drawn using Procreate on a iPad Pro and using an Apple Pencil.

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- Digital drawings, with a large focus on colour for setting and mood
- Single portraits set against abstract backgrounds: interaction of realism and fantasy allows their images to be adaptations instead of direct captures of a single moment - they do the work of character building and exploration by giving the characters “auras” that tell readers/viewers something about them
- Real images they see adapted to be something else (ie. flower drawn as dragon head); in this way, images are metaphorical, and what your eyes see do not have to be what you draw but can inspire other stories

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According to Random History (2015), “The format of the modern day comic book perhaps can be traced to ancient narrative sequences of cave paintings, but more likely to the medieval broadsheet, which was a narrative strip carved into woodcuttings (Hayman and Pratt 2005). As Random History explains, “Broadsheet authors would often create cartoonish narratives of public executions and caricatures of public figures. As the printing press allowed mass circulation of the broadsheets, they were often gathered into collections, or what could be considered a prototype of the modern magazine or newspaper and, by extension, the comic book.”

Cave painting is the earliest known form of sequential art (which is a term proposed by comics artist Will Eisner to describe art forms that use images deployed in a specific order for the purpose of graphic storytelling or conveying information). The flow of the modern-day comic strip evidently illustrates great influences from the cave painting: the simple pictorial images that were painted onto the rock sides of a cave are able to communicate more than just a rough idea of what was happening during the period in which the image was created. The rock ledges lead into each other the way one page turns to the next. There is even more than one event being displayed in a "single" picture, showing the background thought of scene creation that was going into these images.

The late stone age period is where early cave paintings originated from. Looking at these images makes me think of the importance of telling a story, and how truthful storytelling must be found within the core of a piece or else it becomes irrelevant and fails, all this which is influenced by the richness of the cave paintings style of storytelling.

There is more detailed information in these representation than first thought: there are base lines that show where the ground is, there are tusks to distinguish the sex of the animals, there is movement and shading and all of the most important artistic aspects we still seek to render today.
Different tools were used: their body parts, crushed fruit and flowers for ink and pigment, hallow reeds through which they could blow and apply the "paint".

While there are many hand prints, showing the extent of people who partook in this artistic endeavour, there seems to be a similarity in style and ability in the images of people and animals that suggest that not everyone made cave art in the same extent - there were some who were more talented than others. They were not regarded as "artists" however, in terms of what that means in a modern day. Rather, as these images were the only way of keeping and relating information, they probably had a fairly esteemed position within the community. Their artistic work was incredibly important for community formation and evolution.

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Podcast:
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/art-history-timeline-01-prehistoric-cave-paintings/id522513686?i=1000113915733

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art history timeline 01 - prehistoric cave paintings

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‎Art History: Art History Timeline 01 - Prehistoric Cave Paintings on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Art History, Ep Art History Timeline 01 - Prehistoric Cave Paintings - 2012年4月25日

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While babysitting my nephew one day, we took out some paints and starting creating art on paper. Within minutes, he had ditched the paintbrush and was going into the colours with his fingers and hands. This immediately made me think about the cave art I have been researching, particularly the hand prints found on the walls of old caves. I found that caves from all over the world had this type of hand-art - caves that were so far apart in distance and culture that there is no way the people residing within them had communicated with each other. Instead, creating a print of one's hand is a primal and universal instinct for all humans. Even for my nephew in his modern day environment. It is a way to make your lasting mark; a way to say "I was here, too."

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This part of my research was intended to help me get a better feel of my future main character, who is an amateur cartoonist herself. I wanted to understand how people who are in this field conduct their daily lives, what goes into their processes of sketching and drawing, and what impact their profession has on their perspectives and identities.

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1. I got in contact with a professor at Dalhousie, Anthony Enns, who teaches a Graphic Novels course at the university. At first, he was willing to answer some questions for me via email in order to help me with this project. After I sent the questions, however, he noticed that he thought the questions I was asking were better suited for an actual cartoonist or artist, rather than a professor of one, as he didn’t know all the ins and outs of the process or the business. This was definitely a learning moment for me as I realized how important it is to know the ins and outs of your subject before you conduct an interview with them. Asking overwhelming questions, or ones that may be slightly out of their field of expertise, will make them feel unfit to answer the questions and therefore uncomfortable with partaking in the interview. While I didn’t assume that Professor Enns was a cartoonist, the questions I had formed were quite specific to the world of creating cartoons, rather than the world of studying them. This was an important and informative mistake that I will take with me in my future interview-based research.

2. I reached out to several graphic artists and cartoonists that I follow on social media. While I didn’t receive any replies for quite a long time, this was something I had expected and so I tried to not let it dishearten me. The process of crafting messages and sending them to fairly well-known people whom I admire was both anxiety-inducing and confidence-building. It showed me how many attempts you must make without giving up in order to find the information you are looking for, and the person who is willing to give it to you. It also showed me how one’s ego must be taken out of the equation when researching for a writing piece, because not all information can be attained without taking small, sometimes embarrassing, leaps of communication. In the end, at the very last minute, one cartoonist I reached out to over Instagram (Fran, who goes by the handle “howdoyouadult”) responded to me and offered her email as a way to get in touch with her about my questions. I sent along an email - shorter and more concise than the one I had sent my professor as I wanted to ensure that I didn’t overwhelm her with too many questions, or with one’s that weren’t specifically relevant to her and her work. However, I failed to include a timeline in which I would need the answers by, and so she didn’t end up responding in time for me to include that information within my project. This is another important tip and lesson about the art of interviewing that I picked up during this project. Nonetheless, even getting an Instagram message back from this cartoonist was exciting and a good first step, I think!

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After the initial failed interview attempt, I decided to turn back to the questions I had first posed to Professor Enns and, instead, attempt to answer them through watching interviews with various cartoonists I could find on the internet (primarily Youtube). While this wasn’t as immediate and personal, and therefore not quite as effective or hands-on, it did provide me with lots of useful information that came directly from people who knew the field of cartooning very well and lived their lives in this way. I jotted down any information I found relevant to my research on sketching, story telling, and character building. A few of the videos and links I turned to can be found below.

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Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFCxtJ_RoTI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGKO2yeL6lI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBpbaVthJJQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNdeMpAaVQQ

https://medium.com/@andrewgcheek/an-interview-with-cartoonist-henry-mccarthy-ff2b1c8884ea

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She started drawing at a very early age (10 months). She was shy, and so drawing made her feel okay with the fact that she didn’t have any friends. She wasn’t classically good at drawing, but was just good at expressing herself with drawing.

Describes herself as “an overly sensitive person living in a crowded world”, and so she is able to pick up on little behaviours, or misbehaviours, easily

Takes her pen and paper out into the world and draws in the moment, because she finds that it is hard to remember the emotions that she experiences from certain moments after the fact, so capturing it in real time makes it more real and emotive on the page (despite the fact that she often feels awkward and rude doing this)

She says that there is an ideal state for making a certain kind of art, and that is grieving - as in, in my interpretation, the best little nuggets of art come from intense emotions. With something long, like a graphic novel, you need all your wits about you and you need to be more like a scientist and so it’s better to have some emotional distance or be more calm

She feels that cartoons are the most direct medium, in that you only capture the essential thing, as opposed to say a movie which captures everything. She says: “If the face isn’t important, don’t draw it. If the body isn’t important, then draw just the face. If no image is important, then just draw the words.” She also notes how she doesn’t aim to be funny, but she aims to be true and a lot of this is the funniest material, as it is directly relatable.

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Woodrow Phoenix:

Even if they are later rendered on the computer, scanned in order to replicate and manipulate, or copied on a printing press or some other analog machine, most cartoon artists still do most of their sketching, story-building and idea-making with a pencil(s) and paper - Woodrow Phoenix notes how this makes him feel more like an artist

Phoenix also says that all the pros use “nibs”, the pointy detachable ends of fountain pens that tend to catch on the paper and spray ink, so there is an art to knowing how to use one and not letting that happen - it is quite demanding and technical. However, he could never master them and so just uses brushes and pens instead (this made me think about the idea of working with one’s strengths; just because you may not feel comfortable or proficient in traditional, technical styles, doesn’t mean you can’t still do the work of creating a story using the tools that are suited to you). There are many different types of nibs, which vary in size and width and curvature, so artists choose between the different kinds based on what they are drawing, the style they are drawing in or the effect they want their image to have.

Phoenix also speaks about the difference between drawing images with people versus without. When there are no people being depicted, he says that it is important to not be too technical or perfect with your depiction of the scene in order to not let it look like a photograph, but to still keep the feeling that this is an image being rendered or created BY someone; it needs to look like an obvious representation. In terms of making a story feel like a sketch, this makes me think that it is important to keep the narrator, the “I”, and their point-of-view obvious and noticeable in each moment - so that it never just becomes a story being a told, but it is always also telling something about the person telling it - as if you can see the artists hand drawing the images while they do so; the creation is part of the sketch or the story

Despite using mainly black and white, Phoenix turns to red and blue ink for detailing. He says that blue is a “norepro” colour, meaning that the blue colour won’t scan because the screens can’t read it or pick it up. This means that you can draw things in blue and not worry about them being seen in the final, digitized product. He traces his initial drawings by placing them on a light-board and setting another paper on top, so that he can trace his original work with ink

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Steve Bell:

Bell religiously uses what is called a “john heath telephone pin”, because it is soft and has a kink at the end, very much like a fountain pen. He likes this because then the drawing is much more like a writing process. Bell also favours water colour because he says “there is something particularly satisfying with the way it works on the paper.”Bell speaks about how he derives satisfaction from a simple scrape on the paper, or the way the ink wobbles, dissolves, floods and flows, or the way colours blur and change, that’s the essence of what cartoonists do and where they get their joy. This is related to the way I, as a writer, get much satisfaction from writing a good sentence or a good scene, or from the feeling of a good, flowing pen, or the smell of a really good book.

Bell draws everyday, even when he doesn’t feel like it or doesn’t know what he’s going to draw - in the same way that writers have to sit down and write everyday, no matter what. Repetition, pattern, ritual and discipline are important to both professions

There is a lot of repetition in cartooning, in that you are often drawing the same thing again and again, or with small changes in details each time. This can become monotonous, but also forces the artist to spend a lot of time with the main aspects or characters of their story, so they become fully developed and realized and the artist gets to know them extremely well.

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Henry McCarthy:
- “Most of what I have learned about design and the various techniques of drawing I taught myself through trial and error, scribbled in the margins of countless notebooks through school, and then clipboards and sketchbooks. I have always had a love of the human form, specifically faces and hands. I love how much emotion and character they can portray, and I try to illustrate character and personality in every sketch I make.”

- “I always kind of saw the McCartoons series as visual poems, or sentences. Some of them have more direct “story-lines,” where others are more like visions of the different aspects or struggles of life with the bar for absurdity or surrealism stretched out a bit more. Others I make just because I want to tell some silly joke. Some have specific emotions I try to portray, but I try to leave at least a little bit of it up to interpretation (much like poetry).”

- “Obviously there is an order of events, only because I can only finish one after the other, but I never really saw it as a serialized, over-arching storyline. Maybe the hypothetical order of things is just jumbled, or maybe all of these events are happening at once, and maybe the timeline simply doesn’t matter.”

- “I take a lot of inspiration from music in most aspects of my life, but especially in animation. The pairing of visual movement with music can be very effective at telling stories or eliciting certain emotions. Things like “Fantasia” come to mind, but also just things like music videos.”

- “After I finished the first cartoon (took about eight hours in one sitting to complete), I began to search for other songs that I could write little stories to, giving myself the boundaries of about 30–45 seconds, or one musical “paragraph” to write a short story.”