Whenever it’s bad weather, I draw at home and lend a hand to raise my little boys. They will never know what we are doing to give them everything they need.
The Sea Journal: Seafarers’ Sketchbooks, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones, pg 192
Paul-Émile Pajot sharing some life secrets.
Work.
Draw.
Help out with the kids.
Mostly, it seems, she spent her days drawing. She drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery. “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote. She drew when she was unsettled, regardless of the subject. “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things,” she wrote in her journal. “Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.”
Beatrix Potter
From the New Yorker piece by Anna Russell, The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter
You have to stop thinking about anything other than what happened when you were a little kid, and you laid on the floor, and you drew. And you lost yourself in that drawing. And in the end, you absolutely loved that drawing because you made it yourself. And the drawing got hung up on the fridge regardless of how good it was, because your mom loves you and everybody loves you. Why can’t you be that kind to yourself?
Jeff Tweedy, How to Write One Song, pg 58
Jeff Tweedy‘s book, How to Write One Song, applies to anyone who makes things. Music is the medium he reflects on, but when you read the book, swap the word “song” with anything you make – paintings, birdhouses, stock cars, stained glass windows.
Anything.
The advice will still apply.
Throughout the history of graphic design, logos emblazoned with wings are a mainstay.
You have the Detroit Red Wings, Redwing Shoes, The Athlete’s Foot, Birdman’s forehead insignia…
But the electric scooter company Bird, locked up the “winged” logo game for at least the next 6 months. It’s simple (only 7 lines). It’s distinct (recognizable 30 feet away). And still looks dope sweaty and beaten down.
And going back for seconds, Bird gives you three logos for one. Look close. Can you see the pair of wheels? The pair of raptor eyes? The pair of wings?
Pete Doctor is Pixar’s chief creative officer. Recently he sat down for an interview with economist Steven Levitt. On his People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, Steve asked Pete one of my favorite, but ridiculous interview questions. What live advice would you give the 20 year old Pete Doctor, knowing what you know now?
Pete’s response:
I’d probably tell myself draw more. Just get outside and draw, cause your draftsmanship skills are always handy. But more importantly I think, drawing for me, really connects me to stuff. It forces me to see things. I can walk past a house everyday, but then if I stop and draw it I suddenly notice details and things about it that I’d never payed attention to before. So I feel like drawing is a way to slow me down and really connect me to the world that I’m inhabiting that I’m not always fully paying attention to.
An excellent interview for all you drawers out there. Listen in full here.
Ivan Brunetti offers up the cartoonist’s version of copywork in his masterclass book – Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice
Homework Assignment 8 reads:
To the absolute best of your ability, create an exact replica of your favorite page. Do not trace. Any deviation from the original should be unintentional on you part; ineptitude and sloppiness are charmless when deliberate.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan
Brunetti then urges his students to pay close attention to each element of their comics page:
Pay close attention to what you are copying. Think about the artist’s decisions regarding page layout, panel compositions, design, characterization, dialogue, gesture, captions, balloons, word placement, sound effects, line, shape, texture, etc. Hopefully you will gain some appreciation of their working and thinking process… and the difficulty of creating a comics page.
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, pg 60. Brunetti, Ivan
Brunetti practiced this version of copywork in his own career.
He took on the Nancy strip for a time. The pressure from the syndicate to copy Ernie Bushmiller‘s style precisely, further developed his cartooning technique.
I can tell exactly the time period in my work when I was doing these-the syndicate were such nitpickers about me copying Bushmiller’s style exactly that my approach to cartooning got much more precise as a result. I went from doing strips just to amuse myself, without a grand plan, to focusing on formal aspects of cartooning much more: where to place a word balloon, the composition of every panel, and the flow of panels.
In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom
Brunetti enjoyed the project while in the learning phase, but admitted it was an unpleasant way to work:
When you’re copying someone else’s style exactly, you can theorize about it, and actually break it down into a set of rules. So they way I was working by imitating him had almost nothing to do with the way he was working…I also realized that working this way was totally unpleasant, because there are very strict parameters you have to follow, rather than discovering the rules that work. The project was fun while I was discovering all of the rules; I would notice that he would never put certain kind of marks next to one another because they’d look wrong. I became very aware of every penstroke, where he used a ruler, where it was freehand. He had an intuitive sense of what looked good, so for me it was trying to codify this into a set of rules, which made me realize the importance of the consistency of your cartooning vocabulary.
In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists, pg 279. Hignite, Tom
Could Brunetti’s copywork exercise translate into other disciplines as well?
If you’re an aspiring graphic designer you could recreate your favorite logos, stroke by stroke, in illustrator?
Or if you’re a programmer, instead of cutting and pasting, you typed out lines of code, line by line, character by character?
With thought and imagination, copywork exercises can be applied to every discipline.
I wish it weren’t true.
But as a kid, I hated math.
I was that stereotypical third grader who scoffed at his times tables and said, “When will we ever use this when we grow up?”
My theory on why many kids have a poor attitude towards mathematics is that we’re subconsciously taught to avoid problems. Whereas Mathematics is all about embracing problems.
Math wants you to make friends with problems. Spend time with problems, not run from them.
Problems are there to be solved!
True enough, the Altitude-on-Hypotenuse Theorum has yet to be an agenda item on any of my zoom calls. But the skill of problem solving still punches the clock everyday.
And the strategies for solving a math problem, can also be applied to any real world problem.
Grant Sanderson’s 7 tips for solving hard problems are below.
My real-world application take is in italics.
Hopefully at the end, you’ll hate math less.
To learn more about 3Blue1Brown, and Grant Sanderson‘s work, or if you want to hate math less, check out David Perell‘s interview with Grant:
Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration contains a number of Herriman’s original art pieces.
The Krazy Kat strip above, is “cut and stacked”. A layout method used to fit strips into different newspapers.
Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration is the best kind of book. It’s the kind of book you lose an afternoon to. You open a few pages to “have a look”, and an hour later you wonder where the time went.
From: Krazy Kat & the Art of George Herriman: A Celebration
By: Craig Yoe
Happy New Year!
In the last 10 years, comics have become more literary. They’ve explored deeper aspects of the human condition, similar to the great novels.
It’s been a wonderful progression for the form, but its made super hero comics easy to dismiss as frivolous.
Sure, super hero books can be shallow fist fight melees. But they can also be meaningful.
Alex Ross and Mark Waid demonstrate this well as Wonder Woman calls out a graybeard Superman for being a scared, shiftless, ….you get the idea.
From: Kingdom Come
Merry Christmas!
In my mind each season has a specific cartoonist assigned to it.
John Porcellino is fall. None better than John at depicting a walk on a chilly fall day.
Bill Watterson is summer. Watterson is an all season cartoonist, but his panels of Calvin and Hobbes’ summer break hi-jinks are unforgettable.
We’ll go Charles Schultz for spring. Charlie Brown is a baseball player, no question.
Winter? Which cartoonist leads us into winter best?
SETH.
The drawings in Seth’s classic winter tome – It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. depict a frigid, contemplative, Canadian winter in a variety of settings:
A packed, pre-Christmas main street.
A government building taking in a snow storm.
A lonely house sitting in silence.
And a windy walk home.
World building at its finest.
See you next week.
From: It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken: A Picture Novella
By: Seth
Floodlights and Goalposts 