14.6.03

Ampersand has a post that includes a time-series of how one of his latest cartoons was drawn. It's interesting to see how a drawing comes together. He clearly spends a lot more time in getting things sketched out than I ever do. In part, that's due to time constraints. I generally aim at a half-hour turnaround time, from the point when I conceptualize the cartoon to the point when I'm ready to scan it. It's an effect of drawing for the school paper, though with the Scarlet -- where the spots for my cartoons are pretty standard, and I never have to illustrate an article that I haven't read until production night -- I could probably work farther in advance and thus take more time. I complain from time to time about the short-notice cartooning, but after several years I've gotten used to it. I'm not sure what I'd do with more time. In part that may be due to working in a fairly minimalist style most of the time. I draw at only a little larger than the size that the finished cartoon will be published, which (along with my artistic disposition) prevents me from putting in too much detail. I've even cut down on the shading that I used to do, since it tended to look awkward when done with a wider pen such as I was using.

My main hang-up right now is faces -- specifically, faces that are supposed to actually resemble someone. I'm fine with, say, George W. Bush, because he's developed a standard caricature. He's been drawn so many times that it's easy enough to evoke him, even with a drawing that bears fairly little resemblance to the real man. It's the less-well-known (and less-often-drawn) people that I have trouble with. This carries over into non-cartoon drawing as well. I can draw a person's face so that it looks like a real person's face -- but not the exact person I'm trying to represent. There's some knack for recognizing those features that make a person's face distinctive (and, I think, distinctive to the artist and audience -- the same person would be appropriately caricatured differently by, say, an American versus a Japanese versus a Kenyan cartoonist, because experience of a different set of faces makes different features more distinctive), and to capturing and exaggerating them.

The other thing that's interesting is the fact that, for at least the one character illustrated in his post, Ampersand now has a history of that drawing preserved (I'm guessing he scanned the same drawing at intervals, so it's not like he has retrospectives of all of his cartoons on file somewhere). In any creative work I do, I tend to eliminate earlier versions of a work, out of a desire for clarity and avoiding embarassment. (I'd probably drive scholars and historians nuts if I ever became a famous and influential thinker and didn't leave them "papers" by which they could reconstruct my intellectual development.) This tendency is carried to an extreme in my cartoons, where I rarely even keep the "original" of the drawing. At times this makes sense, if I do a lot of cleaning up on the computer, but even for drawings that are essentially finished on paper, all I usually have is the published version in the newspaper and the ultra-low-fi electronic version on my website. But at that point, my archival instinct kicks in. Once a work reaches "finished" status, I hang on to it forever, and get upset if my archive is not complete.
Stentor Danielson, 12:21,

I think Dayton has topography envy. The names of many streets in my neighborhood -- Big Hill, Ridgeway, Far Hills -- suggest the presence of steep slopes. Yet by my Pennsylvania/New York standards, there are none to be found.
Stentor Danielson, 11:46,

12.6.03

This week has made me realize how much of my life is invested in the internet. Being without access except when I can get to the public library, and 10 minutes on an old modem at work, has left me really out of touch with things. And I'm noticing it more than in the last hiatus I had -- the two weeks I was on the intersession trip in Australia, with zero internet. Much of that is probably because I do so much more online now. I didn't have a blog then, and I was just an ordinary SMU on the Brunching Board (and I had taken a Brunching hiatus for the duration of the semester abroad, so the trip didn't affect that).

It's left me out of touch with the news as well, since there is no convenient place to pick up a paper copy of a newspaper (I prefer to read the paper version, but for blogging and for being able to check a range of sources, not to mention price, the internet wins). Assuming this continues, I wonder what it will do to me by the end of my 10 weeks in Dayton. I'll have only a general idea what the issues of note are, and so much could happen in blogtopia in that time. It will be a little like starting over, though without the newcomer boost that you can claim when you're genuinely starting from scratch. I wonder how long it will take to get my commentary muse back, since it needs to be fed with information for a while before it's strong enough to bring out anything interesting.

We'll see. If all goes according to plan I won't be completely cut off, and I'll be able to post here a few times a week. But it will still be a big reduction from how much time I spent online during the past couple years.
Stentor Danielson, 17:01,

10.6.03

... and of course that last post didn't publish properly, so it's another day until I can make an update.
Stentor Danielson, 18:37,

9.6.03

Of course, the week I got links from both Calpundit and Oxblog would be the week that I unexpectedly don't have internet access and can't post thrilling updates to potentially earn some new readers. My internet access is going to be light for the next ten weeks, and nonexistent on Fridays and Saturdays (because the place I'm staying observes the Seventh Day Adventist sabbath). On the plus side, I'll get to do some real archaeology -- excavating an 800-year-old Fort Ancient village, and helping to build a reconstruction of a similar village at SunWatch.
Stentor Danielson, 16:50,