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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!

I had an “A-ha!” yesterday as a result of a fascinating conversation I’ve been having with my client (which I won’t get into here): I’m getting this sense that I’m rightly a lens, a mirror, a painter, a wind turbine — a conduit. I’m not the guy to nail down the theory or state the message. The universe is “out there” and kind of none of my business. I don’t understand how the world works; I don’t have huge, all-encompassing insights. But I do seem to get life at the personal, individual level. I do have personal convictions, but I don’t need to change the world and don’t feel equipped to anyway. I have peace down here. When I look at government or society or the economy, I get frustrated because of the opinions I hold, yet I know deep down that even those opinions are borrowed; I’d throw them out in the face of better information, because I’m not my ideas. I’m something else.

In short, I’m not a fixed point in the universe. That’s not going to sit nicely with someone who’d want me to sum myself up or to permanently join a cause. But it does free me up to let everything flow through me, and know that something of me — my wit, sense of wonder, compassion, *something* — will show up in the product.

I seem to be able to help people think through things, or to better experience what they’re experiencing, and while that’s not as flashy or marketable as being the guy with the tablets on the mountain, I can see the value of it now.

This makes a lot of sense when I look at my work (which sucks when I try to do it without a good creative brief, or when I neglect to ask for real-world input). It also explains why I enjoy drawing and writing so much — yet what the problem with authoring novels was (since a novel is a position, a fixed argument, a thesis rather than an observation — at least as I was writing them).

~

Here’s another insight from this week (sorry, I feel I should draw something to go with this, to make it more palatable, but it’s conceptual, and I just want to get it down):

I’ve been wishing for twelve years that I could lose my accent, and this strikes me now as a big metaphor. This is my voice. I’ve been trying to tone it down out of embarrassment about its force and energy. I don’t blame Scotland for that — nobody’s ever suggested I should change — but it has been what I’ve felt I should do to fit in, to better understand this culture, which is very highly critical of anyone who “gets above” themselves.

When I was in Canada, specifically in the Strategic Coach environment, I had people around me cheering me on. They wanted more, more, more of me. It’s been great having the peace and quiet of Wick, and I don’t want to knock this place that’s has been so welcoming, but I feel a new wind in my sails after this visit to Toronto and I love it. Usually it diminishes back to “normal”, but this time I don’t want that. It’s not just about being celebrated (though why shouldn’t we all be?); it’s about having a purpose. I need that purpose. I’m not finished, and I don’t want to be becalmed, lost in a grey fog halfway between here and Stroma (the abandoned island that’s held my imagination since we moved to the north).

I guess I aspire to having enough self-sufficiency to exist in a void, yet the dawning awareness I spoke of above, that I work best as a medium — well, you can see how that suffocates in this environment.

I also believe that there are lines, patterns, that run through our lives, and when we follow those everything just works. I also believe, though, that we have total free will to deviate from those or ignore them altogether. The only problem is that life off the line will always be a struggle.

I’ve found love in Scotland, and I’ve found the peace to not need to get anywhere or do anything. I’m whole and complete right here, right now. But I’m also still alive, and it seems like it’d be a shame not to see how far I can go with the gifts I’ve been given while I’m here.