The Media You Consume Has A Huge Impact On The Images You Create
round two hundred editorial cartoonists work for the American newspaper market, and there are about fifteen hundred newspapers. Editorial cartoonists start the day by reading the news that will be in the papers that day, given to them by the editors. Then they come up with an editorial cartoon and submit it for publication.
You will see many cartoons about the same subject, and many are the same joke, even.
Sempé was a cartoonist that worked differently. I once read an interview he gave that he doesn’t read the newspapers. And it shows in his work! He observes society with his own eyes and comments on what he sees.
Sempé’s work is almost reportage illustration, and he was brilliant at pointing out life’s little ironies. One of my favorites is children jumping in poodles of water in the rain while adults hide under umbrellas. That is not a response to something he read in the news but to something he saw on the streets.
When you are an artist, input informs output. Curate the media you consume.
This Week
In keeping with this week’s topic of curating media you take in, an interesting thing I realized this week from comments in our Discord server was that we artists mainly consume information visually. (Or maybe that’s because our attention spans have shortened due to our exposure to social media.)Some visuals below. I am experimenting a lot. I just made the demo below as I write this on Sunday.
I need to draw to make these, so it gives me an incentive and goal to draw.
It allows me to showcase the drawing practice resources on the “Practice Drawing This” website. I heavily use these tools myself, and this gives me a unique angle in the tutorials: I have tools that can help you with some drawing exercises. That makes the tutorials different from any other tutorial.
Then I can put it up as a demo on the website, share it in a newsletter article (like this one), and use it as a carousel, as well as in videos, etc.
Best of all, I get to draw a lot more!
Yours sincerely,
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