Grady Klein has posted a wonderful and funny comic with advice on how to survive any creative venture. In his case, it's a graphic novel, so it's titled How to Survive Writing a Graphic Novel. Visually, it's a graceful dance between the artist and his demons. My favorite bit of advice in regard to your demon is, "No matter if he is bugging the **** out of you, always listen to him. Whatever he says."
James Kochalka, artist/musician, has been keeping a daily online cartoon diary since 2002. Just recently, he decided that instead of making people subscribe to see it, he would offer the whole run for free.
Not only does he deal with issues involved in creativity, but he gives a wonderful, loving portrait of his family through good times and bad. The cartoon in this post features his wife Amy and their son Eli.
Beware, once you start reading it's hard to stop.
You can buy collections of these strips plus his other work here.
Rolling Stone magazine listed one of his songs as a best of 2006. Here's a fan made video for the song. He sings "Justin Timberlake" 101 times. Enjoy!
To me his daily strip is a great model for getting yourself motivated for work. Do something every single day. These diary entries are truly impressive when taken all together. It's like an accidental novel assembled from random pieces.
Cartoon via We The Robots (Thanks StoryRobot!)
Outside of writing a "How To" book or piecing something together from interviews, it's hard to get artists to describe their process for working. Cartoonist Ted Slampyak wrote a blog entry that lays out how he works.
I am always amazed that cartoonists can continually meet deadlines, so it's interesting to see how that happens in one case. Most interesting to me is that he does the word balloons first. I'm guessing that means the art in this serves the dialog instead of the other way around.
Shooting for the top can be exhausting, why not spend some time settling for the gutter? Instead of trying to write a good story, write the hackiest one you can. Paint something that would make a high school art class shudder with disgust. Shoot for the bottom!
Making bad art on purpose can make you better at what you do. It lets you burn off all the ideas and bad habits you have in a bonfire of mundane crap. You can identify all the mistakes you can make and then, when you make them again, they will be as obvious to you as a giant rabbit dressed as Abraham Lincoln standing in your breakfast cereal. Once you make the worst you possibly can, you can stop yourself from ever doing it again.
I found a great example of this today, cartoonist Anthony Clark was challenged to draw 200 "bad" cartoons and he did. They are fun to read just so you can spot all the different ways comics can be bad. Of course, some of them are really funny as well.
Use your worst to help you get to your best!
Arflovers has posted a really fascinating historical document. It's a cartooning book for kids called How to Draw 'Em, published in 1941. The idea is to teach budding cartoonists to draw the major figures of WWII. As Arflovers points out, the instructions are a good mix of anti-Nazism and practical cartooning advice. Tojo's caricature is more about an unpleasant racist representation of all of the "oriental races" than even an attempt to replicate his look.
Things like this are an interesting, and sometimes painful, glimpse into art, humor and propaganda during times of war.
Here's a really fun and inspiring blog, Kid Cartoonists! Kids send in cartoons and a real cartoonist will give you feedback. Of course all the feedback is positive. I look forward to updates, not just for the drawing, but to read the wonderful positive things they have to say about them. I wish these guys had taught me art in grade school.
Here's a great site for keeping up with new artists in Asia. Startdrawing.org. I have been blown away by the quality and diversity of style of the artists they feature. The picture with this post is by Vietnamese artist Hoang Ngyuen. Also, take a look at the photo-realistic digital models of Ussa Methawittayakul of Thailand. Beautiful stuff. I can't wait to see what they post twice.
Take a look at the site here
