I started drawing cartoons when I was in single-digits. In recent years, I only get around to it when it’s somebody’s birthday and I want to doodle something and make a card of it, but… I dunno. I kind of feel like doing it again.
When I was at the alternative press fair in London, there was a guy at a table behind mine who doodled all day long in a sketchbook. (I ended up buying his book, because his style is just so full of joy it leaps off the page.) He coloured in his sketches using wash pens, and I loved the easy, even look that produced.
I have a few of those pens, which I’d tried filling with water to deliberately wash the ink out of a line-drawing, turning it into shading, like I’d seen someone or another do on one of the hundred “sketches in a Moleskine” photo galleries. I didn’t have much success with that because, well, I don’t know what kind of paper to use anymore, so the drawings kept ending up as Rorschach blots.
Searching around for good drawing pens yesterday (“best pen for cartooning”), I encountered repeated mentions of inking with a brush. Now, I’ve been reading about that since childhood, but I just never ‘got’ brushwork — I think because I like to be really controlled with my lines.
Well, today I filled one of my wash-brushes with very black drawing ink and lost control.
You know what? It was fun. And now I understand the beauty of the variable line — a look that, ironically, I’ve been trying to reproduce with felt-tips for years.
Lord, it was fun to draw this evening just for the hell of it! I feel ten again.
I think I’ve been lost in being a business. Maybe I just want to have a job and not have to do anything extra in my spare time except create things for fun. I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying to people that they should do this whole while, but I’ve still been buying into that line that we have to produce things and sell them in vast numbers to count.
To hell with that.