Author: hamishmacdonald

I’ve left my darling behind, which makes me sad. But I have to admit I’m excited about connecting with my work and friends in Toronto, and spending time with my nephew, mom, and dad.

The world should be smaller. Or something.

I went to my life drawing class last night, even though there were all kinds of things I felt like I should be doing at home before I leave for two months.

The other people who run and attend the class are really lovely, although sometimes I don’t have the energy at the end of the day to be social, and feel like the words coming out of my mouth are just weirdness.

Despite this, I went last night and I’m glad I did. The model was a repeat, because there are only so many people in this little town willing to get their kit off in front of a room full of people. And I do struggle with the longer poses, because I draw quickly; I don’t know how to do more than what I naturally do.

And, yes, I’ve been meaning to try out different materials. Every week I’ve brought in pastels, but I don’t know what to do with them. Drawing with those big smudgy things would not be expressive for me; I have a way of expressing myself I really like, so last night I let myself go with that and I drew in my own way:

During the long timed drawings, I took the opportunity to draw poses just out of my head, because I found that staring at a real person gave me a sense of how things connected and where the weight was — which I suppose is ultimately the point of going to a life drawing class. The cartoon figures turned out to be my favourites, though.

My big temptation is to draw the other people in the class. And I actually wish we could do some sessions with the models having their clothes on — not because I’m prudish, but because I like the folds and details of clothing, and, really, how many times am I going to be called upon to draw somebody in the altogether?

I made myself a new sketchbook a few months ago, and today’s the first chance I’ve had to actually draw anything in it. That’s the trouble with falling behind: you get so far behind that catching up becomes a bigger and bigger hurdle, and it’s easier to keep engaging with the busy-ness. I find, though, that there’s something really healthy, soul-feeding, insightful about reflecting on those pages.

So here goes (you may need to click on these and see them full-size to read them):

Phew! Caught up.

My main occupation for this past little while has been a book I’m working on with Dan (president of Strategic Coach) called Thinking About Your Thinking. It’s been brilliant seeing this project emerge from a conversation we had on a beautiful evening this summer over a bottle of wine in his back garden. Instead of being a passenger, I’ve got to ride up in the engine with Strategic Coach’s conductor — and even provide some directions!

The topic is endlessly fascinating (I won’t get into it too much here, ’cause that’s what the book will be for), and Dan has been the dream client, leaving me completely alone to free-associate on his outlines and create full-page comic strip summaries of each chapter, with spot-drawings at each chapters’ conclusion.

That’s meant a lot of drawing — probably the most I’ve done in my life at a stretch — but that’s been wonderful practice, and my skills have jumped along with my happiness and satisfaction: I can draw anything I want! Oh, sure, there are subjects where I really struggle with my draughtsmanship, but I’m not stopped; it’s just a chance to figure out this new thing and learn from it.

(The book was supposed to launch next month while I’m in Canada, but unfortunately it’s been delayed until March. I completely understand the reasoning for the delay, though: better to polish what we’ve got than to rush it out and undermine all our hard work.)

For weeks, I’ve felt like my 11-year-old self, but with powerful skills I didn’t have then, along with the freedom and funding of being an adult, and the promise of an outlet, an audience. That’s new. Aside from really enjoying the process of cartooning, I love the way people just immediately get it; it doesn’t feel like struggling in an echo-chamber, as writing did.

EB White — or somebody — supposedly said, “There is no greater human urge than the desire to change another man’s copy.” Anyone who’s literate, who can type and string together sentences, can write, right? True or not, it’s easy to imagine it.

But with drawing, most people are immediately aware that they couldn’t do it. So that helps with the appreciation. “I draw like an eight-year-old,” they say. When did they stop drawing? “Eight.” See, I just kept going.

I’m very aware of my limitations, but I’m also getting clearer and clearer about my little niche — the boundaries of what I can do, which are undoubtedly shaped by what I like to do.

I’m sure the reality of full-time illustration might be different, when there are requests for changes or constrictive briefs. Er, I don’t mean tight underwear, I mean people dictating impossible or boring things to draw. Still, this has been a joy.

I’ve also killed off a few other projects I planned to do, like drawing and binding a book about the 52Hz whale. A friend suggested that I’d be a shoe-in for the National Library of Scotland’s bookbinding prize, and I had an idea for a hand-bound hardcover illustrated book — like an any-age children’s story — but ultimately I’ve been too busy with paid work and the promise of more on the horizon, so I’ve been looking hard at these time-consuming, zero-future projects, and realizing there’s no room for them in my life anymore; that’s not where I’m going.

I also remembered the advice of designer Bruce Mau, who, in his Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, instructs, “Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.” It’s true: that path has always led me to second-guess my themes and set my expectations on other people’s whims, which is a recipe for discouragement and confusion. As I said again and again in my podcast, we should do our own work for our own reasons.

And, finally, as I sit here in the pub, about to slip back into my writing work (wasn’t this the dream at one point?), the television this Remembrance Day bleats about “heroes” and the usual bumpf about how glorious war is. The best thing I’ve read on the subject is this: War is a Racket, by Major General Smedley Butler.

Thanks for coming back. Thanks for reading.

Oh yeah, and I’m about to change the design of this site, ’cause there’s no mention of illustration or copywriting — which, given that those are my trades, makes this site a rather poor calling-card. But I promise not to change the location of this page or the RSS link!

I spent all day yesterday inking in my blue-pencil roughs for the book I’m working on with Dan. I’ll just show a thumbnail here, because I don’t want to prematurely disclose the contents of the book (not that they’re really secret, and I’m know Dan’s talking about this a lot in his workshops):

This is the most cartoon layout work I’ve ever done: as I kid I was always more interested in drawing characters than putting in backgrounds, frames, or even a story. So this project is a great opportunity for me to step up my composition skills, and I also feel that I’m doing the best illustration work of my life. How wonderful, then, that it’s all going towards something that’s going to be published to a built-in audience that’s bigger than anything I’ve had access to before!

“If there’s one thing I’m not interested in — at all- it’s drawing photorealistically. I’m a cartoonist, and I’m interested in using cartooning to abstract a figure into a shape that’s useful due to that abstraction. Like, you take most of the figure away, then add a little bit of yourself, and pow! you have a cartoon.”

— Dustin Harbin

I was having lots of fun working with my Ackerman pen and its flexible Manga G-nib. Suddenly I could reproduce the thick-thin lines I’ve seen in comics I like (and if others are doing it, I should be doing it, too, right?).

Strategic Coach are asking me to do a lot of illustration for them — equal to the amount of writing I’m doing, which is a) giving me lots of good practice, and b) has allowed me to change my “What do you do?” answer to “writer and illustrator”, which feels awesome.

But the Ackerman pen leaks like crazy, and I’m using deadly black ink. (There’s a table at the pub with a new permanent stain for folks to remember me by — oops!) And then the other day I was doing a full-page drawing for a (very fun, as-yet-secret) book project, and I don’t know if it was the amount of coffee I’d had to drink or what, but suddenly the G-nib lines felt huge and out of control, like I’d become a mash-up of Charles Schultz and Katherine Hepburn. I switched back to my “old” method (like, months old), and suddenly felt comfortable and preferred the look of what I was doing — it wasn’t so much an obvious pen-line as just a finished shape.

G-nib on the left, Carbon pen lines & Tombow nib outline on the right.

(At this point, I’m wondering why you would persist in reading about my struggles with pens and paper. Thank you.)

Yesterday on my lunch break, I drove the car to the grocery store — just because I could, YAY!! — and then I started re-watching the documentary Cartoon College. Having just survived driving lessons, I would hardly want to be in a gruelling, deadline-filled MFA course, but seeing the people there, all exchanging ideas and best practices about drawing, I did feel a longing. I’m trying to find the right paper, the right pen, and to work out all these technical and stylistic skills — all from first principles. That’s difficult.

Yet totally fun. I wrote an article this morning then drew the illustration to go with it. How fun is that? What a blessing, to get to spend my days like this.

I’d still like to be able to do more work directly on-screen, so here’s me practising in a spare moment today with my stylus. (I don’t even like cats, but for some reason I like to experiment with them — so maybe that makes sense after all.)

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Today I had my practical driving test. I’ll get to the result in a moment.

Yesterday was my final day to prepare, and I knew that at that point I’d practiced all I really could, I’d been driving for months, and the only thing that could get in my way was nerves. So I pulled out every Oprah-Chopra, hooky-pooky strategy I had up my sleeve to try and get my head in the right place.

(Three nights ago I had a terrible sleep, woke up at 2 a.m., and couldn’t fall asleep again because my heart was racing and my mind obsessing about the test.)

One of the things I did yesterday was sit down to draw, because that’s the one place where I can create my own world. I used that to exorcise my “stuff” about driving:

And? And?

Thank #£$*!!!

After over a month of living in our back garden, “Fluffy” the herring gull chick has moved on.

This afternoon, a woman from the Scottish SPCA and I chased Fluffy around the yard until she could catch him. She gently put him into a travel-kennel, and took him away in her van to a shelter, where I’m told he’ll be put with other chicks to learn how to be a gull, grow flight feathers, and then be released into the wild.

Since we got back from Canada, we’ve been feeding him moistened cat food (the meal-worms were a one-off treat we didn’t want to buy more of). His mother seemed to stop feeding him, and he just wasn’t thriving like the other juvenile gulls around town, who are already flying. Instead, he was just this sad creature walking around the yard, making constant little whistly peeps.

And what sucks we are: Craig got teary this morning when he said goodbye to it from the back door, and I was the same after the bird was gone. I didn’t think I had it in me to be a parent, but given how attached I’ve become to this little dinosaur that’s done nothing but squeak, eat, and shit in my back garden for weeks, maybe there’s hope.

Post script: We visited Fluffy at the shelter. He’d lost his fluff, and was looking a bit vulture-ish. The nice lady there said they’d been feeding him and givinghim a daily bath, and they were going to release him at the beach in another week or so.

Attaboy!