Wednesday, April 16, 2008

John Martz Draws His Mom's 1968 Yearbook


John Martz, who is absolutely mad (but in a good way I think, maybe, probably), did a little drawing project. Well, not little -- it's danged big -- and it was just for fun:
"Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968—over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible."
Here I was thinking that last week, when I posted about drawing 80 characters was a biiiiig deal, Johnny goes ahead and, tempting some serious carpal tunnel, draws a thousand! I'm eating some serious Canadian dust.

See all 1000 heads at Flickr.

Buy the book.

Big hat tip to Journalista!

2 comments:

richardcthompson said...

That is mad, yet ingenious. Have you ever looked at somebody else's yearbook and felt sure that you recognized most of the people in it? It's like every face in it is an archetype, or a stereotype, or something.

Mike Lynch said...

Yeah, I've seen ads that use yearbook photos. They're all over the Web. And I look at the photos and I really think they're from MY yearbook.

It would be fun to take an old yearbook and have a stable of cartoonists each draw a page.