The Art Part

I have a very low boredom threshold, so I like to play around with different ways to render a cartoon. Once I have my idea, I pretty much draw every cartoon the same way on tracing paper, but rendering it is my personal playground. For the past few months, I’ve been rendering my drawings on plain old legal-size white copy paper. Today, I’m using Borden and Riley “paper for ink” it’s called, but what it is is one-ply, or two-ply Bristol board. It has a smooth, hard finish that takes ink and pen or, in my case with today’s cartoon, Micron markers. It’s thin enough that I can use it on a light box to trace my drawings. After rendering, I scan the art into my computer with Photoshop and add color, move things around, take shortcuts, fix spellings and generally make the picture presentable. I tried using a Wacom tablet last year and had nothing but trouble with it. It turned out it was a counterfeit, so I sent it back. While I was struggling with it, I had to go about drawing and rendering my cartoons the same way I’ve been doing it for most of my career, so I decided to save a couple grand and drop the whole idea. If it was good enough for Michelangelo, it’s good enough for me. I’m just grateful I don’t have to draw on a scaffold 75 feet above the floor.