Drawing Poorly

Hello! I was thinking that for next newsletter I might answer some more questions from you. I did this once before. Check that entry out, I think it was fun. It also inspired me to write about breaking into the cartooning industry, which a lot of you were curious about. Anyway, do you have a question for me? Ask it! Ask them here, ask them via email, call me up in the middle of the night and breathe your question heavily into the phone. Whatever works for you.

Ok! I’ve been thinking about drawing poorly. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot people throughout my life. “I can’t even draw a stick figure!” they tell me. First of all, that’s a goddamn lie. Anyone can draw a stick figure. Second, even if you couldn’t, it would take, like, five minutes of practice until you could. Which is sort of what I want to talk about.

Recently, The Oatmeal posted this fantastic piece about AI art. The whole thing is great and absolutely worth reading, but I want to share this sentence from it: “When you observe talent in others, what you’re most likely seeing is skill.” I don’t have to paraphrase this, it’s self-explanatory. Good artists have just practiced a lot. There are certainly people who take to it early and learn faster than others. But those people are practicing all the time too, encouraged early from positive feedback or simply love of the game. Not everyone can be the most amazing artist in the world, but absolutely anyone can be a capable drawer. Even you, guy who’s about to write in the comments “not me!”

The other thing is, it doesn’t actually matter much. My first day in Graduate School at the SCAD comics art program, I was told this: To be a working artist you must possess at least two of these three attributes: good, fast, and cheap. If you’re good and fast, you can get away with charging a lot. If you’re good and cheap, you have leverage to take more time with your art. But if you’re fast and cheap, ahh, life is good, because you don’t gotta be that great at drawing.

This isn’t a perfect structure, and unfortunately most everyone, even the most skilled, are forced to work cheap. But the point is, there’s room in the industry for varying degrees of skill. Throughout my two years at SCAD, I was easily one of the worst artists in the program. Most undergrads were probably better than me. I lacked fundamentals. I had zero handle on perspective, anatomy, composition, foreshortening, all of it. Just bad! I still got work though! Nothing fancy or well paying, but it was experience, confidence building, and a little cash.

I’m better today but I’m far from an excellent artist. In fact, I would say that out of the three, “fast and cheap” is still my wheelhouse. I screw up all the time. This isn’t self deprecation, it’s just honesty. Look at this cartoon I drew earlier this year:

Poor 007’s left leg has been ripped off at the knee, and his foot has been grafted back on. I still don’t have a handle on foreshortening. But I still sold it! The editors also missed the error, because at the end of the day, the cartoon still reads. In cartooning, the most important thing in the visuals is clarity of concept. If you are able to clearly express what is happening in the picture with no confusion on the reader’s part, then the joke will land, and if the joke is good, then you have drawn a good cartoon. So all you have to do is practice enough to be able to simply convey the image.

There are some very good artists out there, ones who have practiced all their life, who have expressed frustration upon seeing less-then-stellar work being published. I get that. In the world of cartooning in particular, it used to be you had to have very strong fundamentals to be published. And there’s some justifiable exasperation when not-great drawings are published, but when it comes to cartooning there is also a danger of being too good.

Well, not exactly. You can never be too good, but I’ve seen well-drawn cartoons that lose their humor because the art is overdrawn, or too studied, realistic and stiff. The fact is, often times, bad art is funny art. I wrote about it a little in my “Breaking In” post, but I’ll touch on it a bit more now. I was playing this Pictionary game online with some friends once, most of whom were not artists. The game was funny, with that ironic, cards-against-humanity tone that prompts you to draw stupid and inappropriate drawings. It was a frustrating experience because over and over the people who “couldn’t draw” made the funniest pictures by far. I wanted to be the funny one! But I would overthink it, take too long, stiffen up, put in too much detail. The longer the game went on, the more pressure I felt to make funny pictures. My competitors were free of such pressure, and that is such a helpful trait to have when you’re drawing funny. They weren’t focused on making it look right, and whether or not they realized it, that loosened them up, and allowed them to follow their instincts. Let give you an example.

There’s a meme called “Are ya winning son?” (beware of that link, the cartoon has NSFW origins.) Even without context, I think the main exploitable image of the meme is hilarious. Here it is:

I have no idea who originally drew it, and perhaps they’re actually a terrific artist, but this drawing looks a lot like the drawings of my competitors from that Pictionary game. The crooked pose. The dumb smile. The little cigarette. It’s perfect. It’s makes you laugh. Makes me laugh anyway. A “good” drawing of this man wouldn’t be nearly as funny.

Now obviously, the best place to be is being a well-practiced artist who can draw funny. There’s lots of those. Pretty much all the New Yorker cartoonists fall into that category. And this essay is not an call for publishing unskilled art. The New Yorker and other publications should maintain their standards as they see fit. The overall point is, that you, imagined guy in the comment section, should revaluate your own self-imposed ranking in the world of art making. You’re unskilled, but still perhaps a funny artist, who, after a little practice can be a working cartoonist. I know you hear the tempting call of AI. I say you ignore it, and start your own drawing journey. I promise you it will be a hundred times more rewarding.

Ok that’s it! Remember, ask me some questions! Any kind! Ask for some tips or something. Tell me why you think I’m wrong. About the post or just in general. And please, if you have a second, like this post, share it, tell a friend. Thanks so much!