Cartoons, sketches, operas (OK only one opera) on everything from dead rabbits, private investigative bread and pergolas to musical deep-sea creatures, contrary cowboy vegetables and barren bees.
Blimey I sort of missed last week. And nearly missed this one. And have not boomed the stats I e meant to and Bored of a Record Shop is filling up my email 😁 Dunno where my head is.
This one is one of the first ‘relationship’ ‘toons I did and I still love it. In fact this is an updated version from a while back and I don’t think I’ll change it much for the book. Except maybe the font.
I’ve also realised I haven’t got that many ‘toons on divorce, and breakups and the like (yes a few on being dumped but they are more suited to the dating part I think – so I’ll have to put on my thinking cap. And if y’all have any ideas or stories, let me know!
I promised a preview. Thought I could do this as a slideshow but can’t see the option but if you click on the image you can follow on from that. This is about half the book and some images still need a bit of editing but its more or less there. I am organising them in the order tat relationships happen – dating, breaking up, marrying/moving in etc. I am thinking of doing some pages either in a block colour (if the book is colour) or black or grey (if its in black and white) like the cross dresser page. Perhaps this can be a divider between different parts of the book. Anyway let me know what you think!
Here’s another one that needed trimming. See original below. I was riffing on well-meaning advice from smug marrieds so the blowing hot and cold joke was just not needed. It’s much better now though I do like that look inside Brian’s head. But I think Brian could be drawn better maybe? With more contrast?Is it obvious he’s an orangutan? That he’s picking his nose?
I did promise a look at the book layout though I have not done what I wanted to before I show a sample. So -next week! And I am falling behind on booming all your stats. Expect me soon!
This is an odd one. I don’t really get the second part of it – something to do with dating trees which I may make another ‘toon out of. I have a bad tendency to get overexcited and tag ‘extra bits’ on or not spend the time ironing out an idea. I do this in my artwork too and I call it my ‘too muchness’. I often wonder that, if my ‘too muchness’ is me, why can’t I keep it? That can work for big weird artworks but for ‘toons I think clarity is better. So I have chopped off the last panel and changed the text. I might put a couple of policemen into the last image instead of diners.
I also started putting together the book this week and I am sort of excited about that too. I had been thinking about using the same font throughout – probably because of the same neuroticism that is obsessed with cleaning up my ‘style’ – and was going to ask which one you thought was best. But in putting the first ten pages of the book up, not only do the diverse styles work but diverse fonts do too – excepting the less readable ones. I think thats what you guys have been trying to tell me all along! There is still a bit of work to do, cleaning up images, rewriting some jokes and also rejigging panels so they fit on a book page. While as April said the titles arent necessary I may add a few lines of text here and there to give them some cotext but I am seeing lots of possibilities now and I am really happy I started to review them this way. Your help, my friends, has been invaluable. I will show you a preview of the first pages next week.
Fonts: I thought I had used three over the course of the years, maximum, but turns out I have used about six -along with my own handwriting. They are laid out on the updated ‘toon below. Let me know which one you like best. There are two of them I am definitely not going to use but not sure about the others yet..
Speaking of styles, this one probably falls close to the ‘intricately planned, drawn and hand coloured in pieces’ I mentioned a few posts back and the characters are more more realistic in style than most of my ‘toons. Some of these ‘toons riff on historical or political issues, reflecting some of my interests (for ‘interests’ read ‘rant food’) while mushing things together in ridiculous way, like this one on Ogham Stones. The other big difference here is that it is narrated rather than using dialogue. There’s one on Otzi the Iceman for example, which was a long riff on that Ice man’s reconstruction complete with his death pose. I think that one confused people and might possibly confuse me now.
This one is much clearer – I think I had been reading about new research into neolithic male and female roles at the time – but as its focus is more about history than dating it may not go into the Love & Carnage book (Yes I think I’m going to go with Fraggle’s suggestion!). Let me know what you think. I think Deirdre’s cool. I haven’t done any editing at all on this or even looked at it properly because I have a rotten cold this week.
Late Again!I’ve started posting mideweek as the ‘toons are coming thick and fast (literally) at the moment but it’s making me forget when its Friday. Doesnt help that I’m out of work. Or that I was in the pub last night….The plan at this point was to post the old ones along with the update. I am falling behind on that though I have done a quick bit of work on this. I mean to create a book file in Word soon and send it out to my select Beta readers – you know who you are.
This is an early one and it needed some editing. The older version is below. I haven’t settled on a typeface/font yet but I like this one and I think its good to differentiate the dialogue from the…grunting! I took the title out. I started putting the blog title into the images for posting on facebook, before I was blogging properly. The drawing is OK actually, me trying to be neat. My style loosens up later though I still revert to to this style too. I always loved pink and purple as a kid and they often appear in earlier ‘toons. The argyll tank top often appears on the boyfriends. My mother loves those kind of chaps and in the past, if she saw me even near one, she would say to me after, ‘wouldn’t he do?”. Needless to say I ran/run a mile from them. I hated the missing ears in the second panel – my wonky ears in effect missing in real life. You can see at the left edge which is grey that I didnt crop the scan properly. And perhaps the idea needs a little work?Is it clear?Makes me laugh but then I am one of the weird ones…
It’s happening again. The ‘toons. I dont think its really because I restarted the blog though that’s a part of it. It’s more because I feel both more energised by leaving a job that was making me unhappy and perhaps the stress of being jobless – though in truth I don’t feel stressed, god knows why. Maybe because I am putting lots of plans into action. If I can just stop cartooning…
Anyway here’s another one. If there are any youngsters out there hoping that when you get old you won’t have to put up with people acting like children – forget it. I seem to regularly cause people to stop talking to me for reasons I am unable to fathom. Getting real tired of it now. As Jerry Seinfeld says, ‘People. They’re the worst.’ The good thing about being old is that while this is annoying, I don’t care that much.
Late again…my midweek shark confused me! What about this one?I like it and I mostly like the drawing. This was done when I was tidying up my cartoons and experimenting with flat colour via Photoshop. I also did a version without the last panel which I think works a lot better. My wacky/sweary side always like to go off on a tangeri…sorry tangent but sometimes it takes away from the joke.
And here are the Easy Peelers in their own panel which emerged a few years later. I think the policemen could be clearer.
The next bit is just me thinking out loud, so please feel free to skip it!
My ‘problem’ with my ‘toons is the same problem I have with my painting. A huge amount of styles which evolved over the years because I considered what I was doing at any given moment wasn’t good enough. I am working on that with some success – mostly because age makes you say ‘Fuck It, it’s good enough.’ (and truly, good enough is the best thing to aim for I now believe). But reviewing a project like this (10 years plus now!) I am left with a plethora of styles and lines of creative enquiry which bothers the anal little dictator in my head. Sometimes I wonder if I’m the dictator and I absorbed a wackier, more flibberty gibbet twin in the womb…or vice versa.
People say to me you don’t need a style, contemporary art and postmodernism are about disruption. And the ushering of artists into boxes is something I viscerally react badly to (maybe another reason why I dodge and weave between types of work – ‘ you won’t catch me popular success!’. Even Picasso’s work was divided neatly into periods the better for public digestion. Differing styles should be fine but alongside my dodging and weaving there is also that desire to organise everything, square it off, put it in a category. Until now I thought it was partly a function of my design background but perhaps I’m just human too…
With the ‘toons I have four distinctive styles (she said organisingly); rough initial sketches; loose, sketches in black and white or with scribbly color; more exact but minimal sketches with flat colour; intricately planned, drawn and hand coloured in pieces. I am not sure if this means anything. Evolution of work?Sometimes but I still zig and zag between modes. Mood? Panic, hysteria, distraction, tiddliness? Confidence?Too easily influenced? But who isn’t in our image based society….
Some of them are ideas in the course of being worked out. Some toons that don’t work carry germs of later ideas. Some ideas don’t age well – things connected to newpaper stories long lost and also the cartoons which emerge from my own annoyances don’t age well either – they just look petulant. Sometimes the rough sketches work, sometimes they don’t but then trying to keep that initial energy or not is a decision to make….maybe its all just the creative process.
I have recently been selling off painting which I have done over the last few years, which have seen my work being very unfocused – which is fine – but the odd thing is, in organizing them, photographing them, measuring them, posting them in groups I am starting to see a ghost of a unifying force which is not the organisation of them but something underneath. Which I suppose is me…
Boy. I wasn’t expecting that!I was just posting a toon in my phone and yelling at the seagulls trying to eat the Spuggies food and all the above came right out…
I have to say I am really starting to enjoy looking over all the work now. There is a lot there!
This week on social media footage of a killer whale (sorry orca) attacking and eating a great white shark was circulating. And lo a cartoon appeared, nearly fully formed.
My writing seems to be kicking off again too. I have just finished my job at the local arts centre after five years and the last year was a bit , lets say, disappointing, so perhaps my neurons are happy again. Or maybe they re trying to distract me from the fact I have no job…and my car’s currently costing me a fortune and my friends are avoiding me…all true I’m afraid. Well, only some friends and they can go screw. Here’s how it evolved…the Jungfish (Lungfish?may be a bit of a stretch…)…as always I kind of prefer the real sketchy first drafts.
Monster in the Next Room 
