So I read an article recently by Seth, a cartoonist who comes from Clinton (yes, someone of note came from that hole), about how being a cartoonist often entails a lot of time spent alone.
It got me to thinking, should it really entail that much time alone? I mean sure, there are obvious times when one might spend hours sitting in front of a desk tediously inking the page of a comic, so that might be called time spent alone, but is that really any different from any other profession? An accountant will spend hours huddled away running calculations, and a professional athlete will spend hours alone working out or practicing. Hell, an actor will spend hours by themselves just practicing a character, going over and over the same emotions just to get them perfect.
In this way, then, every profession could be looked at as one that requires a great deal of time spent alone. I think that if anything, being a cartoonist is one that requires a lot of time being out there, with people, doing things so that you might gain an insight and some experience as to what it is that you are actually illustrating here.
You can only paint/write/draw what you know, at least, you can only do it well if you know the subject. I suppose anyone can pick up a pencil and draw a tree, but if you've never spent anytime near a tree, how are you going to know that you got the details right? And if you've never even seen a tree? Forget it.
The same can be said about being a cartoonist. You're constantly drawing surroundings and placing characters into backgrounds and settings that you've got to know something about. Even in a setting that you have entirely created, you have to have some kind of reference. Dr Seuss took walks in the park, too.
And I feel the same about being with people. Unless you intend to exclusively work with lonesome disconnected characters, how do you intend to draw people interacting with each other if you've never been there?
It doesn't seem all that quiet of an art when you're illustrating a character standing in the crowd at a concert, unless of course you've never been to one, and I think you'll find that doing so would be a difficult endeavor in that case.
1 comment:
I definitely agree that art is all about experience, especially comics, however, it's usually the writing half that requires real interaction. More so if you accept that the writing encompasses what you are drawing; the events and environments visited, on top of the dialogue.
Your points seem to deviate from the territory of solitude and address the concept of leaving the house instead: you're forgetting that you can take a walk in the park and still be alone; in fact, I'd think you'd be more likely to contemplate your surroundings if you were. You also don't really need human interaction to take in a tree's details.
You're right though, in that being alone doesn't specifically apply to professions in art... but I do think that the solitude is still heavily applicable to the job. The exception is, as you were saying, in realistic drawings of character posturing and their reactions to each other's speech, but that's still just that: the exception and not the rule, unless your entire comic is two sociable people speaking realistically to each other, without much else happening.
I don't suppose this Seth thing is online.
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