People - Argh 2

Just about managed to get this done in time for Climbers on Sunday.  David's head and Nathan's speech bubble are both cut-out windows with a strip of paper behind them.  As the strip is pulled, Nathan's speech bubble changes from the man stealing the sheep to David stealing Bathsheba, and David's face changes from stern to convicted.

I figured it would be a bad idea to give cutting mats and scalpels to a bunch of 6 year-olds so did the cutting out myself the night before.

Proverbs 13:12

I'm not sure about this one.  The original sketch had the thirsty chap in the desert finding the dried-up well and, unseen to him, a cluster of rain clouds beginning to produce raindrops in the background.  However, I wasn't sure if people would get what was happening with the rainclouds, so decided to go with the more obvious idea above.  I'm not certain, however, whether the cluster of trees is a convincing enough explanation for why he's not spotting the lake full of happy bathers just a short distance away.

People - Aaargh!

I am trying to draw a picture to be used in Climbers (Sunday School) this Sunday, something to photocopy and hand out to the kids to colour in.  The subject is "Nathan Accusing David" - unfortunately a major obstacle is my inability to draw human figures.  It's been a pain in the neck forever - I can draw animal characters, robots, almost anything except people.  Every cartoonist/illustrator develops their own "visual language", a kind of shorthand to enable them to draw most things on spec as the story demands.  Charles Schultz, for example, had his own unmistakeable shorthand for children and you wouldn't mistake his round-headed, dot-eyed, virtually legless characters for anyone else's.  Yet somehow I've never managed to come up with my own solution to this visual problem.

btw I've also been attempting to make this blog look a bit more presentable, fiddling around with layouts, widgets etc.  So if it looks a bit of a mess for a while, that is why.

The curse of never finishing

I've been putting the creative pursuits on the back burner for a spell while concentrating on more pressing matters (I had a GCSE biology exam recently which was a bit of a stinker!) but now that it's out of the way I've been attempting to finish off the unfinished pics on my computer (and there are a fair few) and complete some of the unfinished models as well.
My creative process generally goes like this:

1. Start a drawing or comic strip or model.
2. Keep going with it until I hit a snag - for example, I'm making a model monkey and can't quite work out how to do the feet, or have done a cartoon but am really struggling with the colouring stage.  There is usually something that keeps the process from being straightforward.
3. Abandon it for a later date and start something else.

Very rarely do I simply sit down and see something through to completion in a single sitting.  As a result an awful lot ends up never getting finished, and this is one of the issues that keeps me from being properly functional as a creative person.  Also, one's failure to finish things contributes, in itself, to a general sapping of morale ("what's the point in starting anything?")

Anyway, a couple of pictures have seen completion this week, which has helped to boost my enthusiasm somewhat.

One is a business card.  I've been meaning to get around to this forever as I'm always meeting people, telling them about my work, and having nothing to give them.  Recently my good friend Mark organised an exhibition in his church to which several people contributed and some of the folks who saw the work expressed an interest in purchasing it.  This included some of my pictures and some by another lady, Barbara, and neither of us had left anything with our contact details on, so getting connected with potential customers was more complicated than it needed to be.

And here's another piece.  A big part of being functional as an illustrator or cartoonist is not only working when you feel like it, but keeping on going after the buzz has stopped.  If you only ever do it for pleasure, it should be left as a hobby rather than a career.

(By the way, the rainbows in the above picture were a complete nightmare to do!)