Cartoon Class: Drawing, Drawing, Drawing

I'm talking about my cartoon class today. If you are interested in learning to cartoon, I teach in New England and New York. I'm currently book Fall 2010 dates, In the meantime, my book is available for sale.


Some of the kids in my cartoon class surprised me on our last day of class with some wonderful homemade cards. Above is Noah's.

In the cartoon classes I teach, we draw a lot. When you are a cartoonist, you have to know how to draw EVERYTHING and, yes, it sure helps if you have ideas and are able to write too.

Drawing everything takes a long time, so I show them how to cheat.

Whenever I say "cheat," that gets attention!




From left: pear, triangle, triangle. Just by changing the shape of the head, your cartoon character becomes a different type of person.

You can show people in a car without actually drawing the car; or get the sense of where a chef is by merely showing his immediate surroundings -- no drawing the entire kitchen, the spice racks, the pots & pans.



Above is scanned from my messy sketchbook.

Another for instance: You can show the concept of "lost" with the below drawing:



I don't even think you need the word "Map" on the thing.

Anyway, point being that, yeah, OK, you DO have to be able to draw a lot of different stuff --

-- And a lot of the drawings are FUN to do -- BUT -- you can learn shortcuts, or "cheats," if you want to use that word.

It was gratifying to see Hannah's card (below), which showed me some of her favorite drawings that she learned to do -- one of which was one of those "cheats" -- that poor lost couple.




Thank you, Mary Waterhouse, Director of the Acton Public Library, and Hannah and Noah, and the great future cartoonists of Acton, Maine. It was my pleasure to teach you these past six weeks. See you in the funny papers!