drawn along in the wake

I’m playing with Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice. This is possibly a really goofy thing to do, because this book is based very closely on the syllabus of a class he teaches at my school and that I will be taking next fall. But I like the book, so I got impatient, and hey, there is nothing in here so far that will kill me if I do it twice.

Exercise 1.1: draw a car in 4 minutes, then in 2, then 1 minute, 30 seconds, 15 seconds, 5 seconds. Repeat with a cat, a castle, a telephone, and a self-portrait.

I won’t spam with all of these, but I enjoyed the castle most, so have that.

Exercise 1.2: draw at least 25 famous cartoon characters in no more than 10 seconds each.

I am really curious to see how many people can actually identify any of these. There are only a few that I think are really obvious.

Also, I apologize for the sudden drop in image content here; I’ve been having problems with my scanner, so for the next couple of weeks it’s back to the camera and it just does not get along with this paper.

Exercise 1.3: pencil out a 10×10 grid, and fill each box with an illustration of the first word that comes to mind, taking no more than 5 seconds for each.

Brunetti calls this a “Zen” exercise, but it actually stressed the hell out of me, as having a beeper go every five seconds will do. The results were largely unintelligible and honestly not worth posting. I might try it again some other time.

Homework 1: create a 8×11 “doodle page” in black and white, arranged according to some larger scheme but with a dense variety of smaller drawings.

I worried about this one for a bit, because I wasn’t quite clear on what was being looked for, but then I decided the open-endedness was probably the point and if it isn’t, I don’t care, because I’m not being graded on this. I used sepia and white, because I’m a rebel I already spend a million hours a week drawing a comic in flat black and white and I wanted a bit of variety.