The Evolution
Warning: this section gets a little in-the-weeds for art nerds.
The thing that was killing me was velocity. The Barr piece took awhile, maybe a week. I was pretty focused on it and I missed a lot during that week. I started making a list of ideas and very quickly realized that there not enough weeks left in the year to devote a week to each of them. And forget keeping up with current events.
The idea of cartooning was appealing to me. It’s a medium that I felt I could use to create completed illustrations, concept to export-as, every day (more or less).
I had recently completed a “skills test” as part of “job interview” in which I was required to produce 20 illustrations in 48 hours. The whole thing was nonsense, possibly bogus, but I did it because I knew I was thinking about dailies and I wanted to verify that I could still put the petal down.
While the experience taught me that I am not as young as I used to be, and I should under no circumstances pull an all-nighter anymore, once I got my feet back under me, I was ready to go.
I knew I was going to need to do some serious alterations to my style. The Trump Rally piece from earlier was run in the Opinion section of The Tulsa World on July 13th. I was thrilled, of course, but I wasn’t crazy about the way it looked on newsprint. It seemed faded, gauzy. I am also an inexplicable traditionalist when it comes to newspapers... color is for Sunday.
My first cartoon, and the birth of Project Goat Rope was basically a grayscale version of an illustration I would normally do in color.
The first real cartoon. Almost.
I liked it, but I envisioned the grays in a half-tone screen, and I didn’t like what my mind’s eye saw... a mess of ill-defined dots. So I made the decision to switch to linework and graphic illustration; all 100% black, shading created by stroke variance and cross-hatching. I had no idea what I was doing, but dove in. I set up more rules:
That’s more like it.
Minimized caricature. Nothing against it, it’s just not for me.
Minimized labeling. If practical using naturally occurring signage, branding, logos, etc., as identifiers.
Low detail, high contrast, dimensional silhouettes.
Use with linework to create texture, rhythm, focus.
Follow styles for dialogue, thought, sounds, comment.
Mix portraiture with graphic figures/elements.
Create drama with lighting, perspective, scale, composition.
Be smart. Be funny. Be real.
Don’t sweat it if they don’t get it. To a point.
Innovate, Evolve, Persist.
