I enjoy listening to all kinds of jazz, from night club jazz to New Orleans street jazz.
Although I am not a jazz musician of any sort, I have a theory: That there are a lot of similarities between drawing cartoons and playing jazz in that you improvise a lot.
I draw cartoons quickly with short swift strokes. It is as if when I am drawing a cartoon I am signing an autograph. From the moment my pen hits the paper, I do not stop drawing until the cartoon is completed.
Now, I am not saying that when I draw cartoons everything goes perfectly. Far from it. I mess up a lot. The trick is to just keep drawing and try to hide your mistakes as you go along. Improvise.
You have to draw like a magician. You have to give the illusion that the mistake, if you find it, was actually intended, or part of the original carton.
Cartooning, contrary to what art critics might think, is fine art. It is just a fast paced fine art.
You look at a cartoon closely. The cartoonist, you will notice, knows exactly what he and she is doing. Everything is balanced, in correct proportion.
In other words, not just anyone can draw cartoons. It goes beyond doodling, or to the next level of doodling. It is the fine art of doodling.
When painters paint, the way they move their brush, the way they command it, they paint at a literary pace. When cartoonist draw, they move at a much faster pace—at least I do.
The best example of which I can think of this is a video called The Making of New Yorker Cartoon on YouTube. It features the cartoonist, David Sipress, who explains the process of drawing a cartoon as he is drawing it.
Perhaps, Sipress explains it perfectly:
You draw it. It kind of feels like the idea passes through you. You weren’t responsible for it. It kind of happened to you. You look down and see it on the page. It surprises you. It delights you.
Now, of course, the more you draw a cartoon, the better you get at it. For instance, I draw cartoon boys, girls, snowmen, and Martians so much I rarely mess up.
Pine trees are one of the easiest cartoons to drawn. You can kind of slop them into a cartoon, and they still look good.
The wider, or longer my strokes, the harder it is for me to draw them. The shorter the stroke, of course, the easier.
It is almost as if when you are drawing a cartoon, you are participating in an Olympic event. In this case, the gymnastics of drawing cartoons. The dismount, believe it or not, is the easiest part, signing the cartooning.
It takes me about five minutes to complete a cartoon. If I add color, which on occasion I do, a cartoon takes longer.
I believe the best cartoons with color take very little color, just enough color to draw the observer into the cartoon. I usually add literary a spot of color to the polka dot I draw on little Martians.
I used to draw cartoons the old-school way with a pen a paper, well, not that old-school. The old-schoolers used fountain pens.
Now, I draw cartoons digitally with a pen tablet and stylus.
There is only one thing I do not like about drawing a cartoon with a pen tablet and a stylus. As you draw digital strokes across the tablet, the line sometimes breaks or skips.
Sometimes, there is nothing you can do about it. You have to stop and start drawing the cartoon over.
I wonder if the rubber stylus tip is chipped, ripped, cut, or sliced into, or the tablet has too much dust on it. I do not know.
Nonetheless, being it pen and paper or pen tablet and stylus, I draw at the same pace—quickly with short swift strokes.
There is nothing like the feeling, though of completing a cartoon, and if it makes you laugh, if it delights you, then you know you have a winner for the reader, but it the cartoon has to start with the cartoonist.