“Holy #%@! - that was hard to draw.”

Toonstack #3

Mar 28, 2021

Dearest Toon Pals,

Welcome back to Toonstack! We rotate editors weekly and this time you get me - Kendra Allenby - at the helm. I took the opportunity to make my friends comment on a topic I think about all the time: how #%@g HARD it can be to draw. I learned to draw as an adult and found the process immensely painful at times - so often my goals outpaced my skills. Of course, some of our crew were born with their drawing genius fully developed. It’s not the only reason I hang out with them, but of course I’m always hoping some of their raw skill will rub off.

Hilary Campbell

This is a cartoon I have redrawn so many flippin times. I really wanted to be able to not have my hand freeze up. Not to truly draw the horses, but to just get the feeling of motion. Sometimes when you’re drawing and you feel THE PRESSURE OF THE WORLD on you, it’s impossible to just let your hand relax and do what it wants to do. It’s funny but, I always think my favorite version of every cartoon I draw, is really the little rough of it that I do in my notebook - because that’s the one I did when I wasn’t worried about what it would look like.

Anyway, I love horses, but this cartoon never sold. #SAD

-Hilary

Ellis Rosen

This cartoon involved drawing 12 people playing an instrument, in perspective, in a jury box, which you'll note has no door. I chose not to draw a door because it would give away all the problems with this drawing, notably how there's no room for anyone to actually sit in it, with or without holding a tuba. There’s a lot of stuff wrong with this drawing: everyone's height is weird, that guy in the front has a super long arm and despite all the detail on the jury it's an unrealistically sparse room. But this brings me to my larger point: Nothing is hard to draw if you don't care how bad it looks.

In fact, that's my philosophy with everything. Too hard? Just do a bad job! For instance, parenting is very hard, so my 2-year-old daughter has no boundaries, gets whatever she wants when she wants it, has no consistent schedule and is currently setting the house on fire. This of course means I can’t get mad at other people for doing a bad job, which is why I haven't yelled at the firemen outside who are spraying water at the wrong house. They’ll figure it out. Or maybe they won't, but who am I to judge?

-Ellis

Johnny DiNapoli

Musical instruments are tough! Pianos, drums, anything with strings. For this cartoon, the guitar and bass took me a looooong time. But sometimes when I get an idea and start drawing it, I feel compelled to finish it. I probably listened to the Monster Mash about fifty times while drawing this. The kicker for me was when I finished it and the cartoon ran, no one said anything about the guitar or bass, but a saxophonist called me out, saying that’s not how you hold a saxophone. Well...crap!

-Johnny

Jason Katzenstein

“Parody an Edward Hopper painting,” I thought. “What, like it’s hard?” I thought. I did this last summer for the New Yorker. I’m an impatient painter, but digital “painting” does dispense with some of the parts I like least (the smells! The headaches from the smells! The messy hands!). Hunter S. Thompson would verbatim type pages from The Great Gatsby to really understand what it felt like to write like Fitzgerald.

Copying masters is difficult, and it’s difficult not to learn new tactics for solving visual problems, exciting new ways to compose and render. In my undergrad painting class one of our assignments was to do a “master’s copy,” as faithful as possible a copy of a painting of our choice. I chose Hals’ “The Laughing Cavalier.” Look at this dude’s sleeve and feel the pain of twenty-year-old me choking on paint fumes wishing I’d chosen a Rothko:

But oh, what a stache. This is the original painting, by the way, not my copy. Or is it? It is. The original. For a whole movie about a painting that’s fake, or is it, yes it is, or is it, check out F for Fake. I quite enjoyed it.

-Jason

Amy Kurzweil

My confession is that when things are too hard to draw I google image them, put my paper up to the light of my computer screen and then I [said in a whisper] trace (gasp) them. But give me some credit: Sometimes you have to spend tens of minutes searching for the right angle of the f@%&ing hand holding the iPhone before you find the right one to trace. And obviously not every configuration of what you want is googleable or traceable. Like sometimes you are drawing a Subaru crosstrek and every f@%&ing google image of a Subaru crosstrek is facing the left in ¾ view and for the love of god you just want it cleanly facing the right. Sigh. Maybe I should just do a bad job. Thanks Ellis, what a revelation.

So I guess the hardest things for me to draw are things that aren’t things. For the book I’m working on, a graphic memoir partly about my grandfather who was a musician, I tried to draw music. Music does not have a shape or a way it looks, as it turns out. So this was challenging. This is what I came up with:

And here’s a cartoon about musicians and monkeys! I traced that crosswalk ;) -Amy

Navied Mahdavian

Last year I read Walter Isaacson’s “Leonardo da Vinci,” where I learned that Renaissance painters called their preliminary sketches “cartoons.” As some of you may know, I also draw cartoons. You can see where I’m going with this.

So, being a Renaissance painter myself, I decided to redraw Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment.” Now, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to faithfully reproduce the whole painting. I didn’t have four years like Michelangelo (I had, like, four hours and I was getting hungry), and drawing is hard. So I reduced the number of human figures from 300 to 35. But I did add six cats. Which is, like, six more than the original, give or take. Michelangelo was a pretty good painter, but you know what he never painted? Cats. You can see where I’m going with this.

-Navied

Jason Chatfield

The above cartoon came out of thick, garbage-musk air last month while I was stalking the now vacant streets of the Flatiron District.

I wanted to draw this little ritual in that restaurant setting above, with a lone couple on a date, the waiter playing out the little wine ritual, and the guy really getting in to the ‘impress my dining partner’ performance, with a gigantic stack of wet, hot New York summer garbage behind him. (more)

-Jason

Kendra Allenby

Sometimes I sit at my desk and think “ha ha! I am a cartoonist,” and I grin a big goofy grin. This is usually nice, except that sometimes my brain uses this information to assume “and because I am a cartoonist drawing must be easy for me.”

Then I start my batch and the drawing is IMMEDIATELY HARD. It takes me a few minutes to remember “Oh! I forgot. For me, sometimes drawing is very hard.” This calms me and I carry on.

I have cartoonist friends for whom drawing is not hard. I am amazed by them. I have gotten much better at drawing, so now many things I draw aren’t hard, and I am amazed by me. These days, I come across 2 kinds of hard: rip-your-hair-out hard, or “oooh, this is satisfying” hard.

This was the second cartoon the New Yorker ever bought from me - it haunts my waking dreams. Not the whole cartoon, just the roof overhang of that middle house. It’s an Escher impossible construction - but instead of being cool like Escher it’s just boring and wrong. I tried for so long to get it right, but at that time I really didn’t know how to fix it and in the end I just sent it in.

Below is the “rough” for that same cartoon. Note that here I cunningly avoided the problem by making the other neighborhood houses into weird little ghost houses whose lines never meet up. Cunning.

COOL CARTOON EXTRAS
Go read Ellis’ weekly cartoon series Junk Drawer!
The Other Children of Passover - it’s the perfect time of year to check out this great New Yorker piece by Amy, Jason and Ellis

And that’s our show folks! Thanks for coming by, invite your friends to join us, and toon in next week for more of the good stuff.

-Kendra

ToonStack

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