Hipster dinosaurs by Molly Lewis (@molly23)

Behold the power of captions…and a few crayons. My favorite might be Tommy Wiseausaurus

Porcellino Crafts A “Map of My Heart” - Comic Book Resources

Great interview with John P focused on process.

I was interested to hear how he worked on his Thoreau book (see: lay it all out where you can look at it):

For Thoreau, I was working with his writing directly, so what I did was create notecards with little anecdotes, quotes etc on them, and arranged them by theme - animals, weather, the pond, independence, etc. I knew I wanted to present the book as a passing of seasons, like the original Walden. Then it was just a matter of finding some kind of narrative thread, or progress, in terms of presenting his thinking in an evolutionary way.

(This almost exactly how I made my book.)

And how Zen shaped his work:

When I discovered Zen, the things that attracted me to it were its humor, its simplicity and its emphasis on everyday life. These were all things that I was working with in my comics already, but Zen kind of gave a form to these somewhat amorphous ideas I’d been kicking around for a while. Zen practice is the practice of everyday life, so, as a cartoonist, my comics are an important part of that. Practice is finding out who you are and working out your place in the world. So to me, these two things go hand in hand.

Pixel Art and Cartooning - John Martz’s Notebook

I’ve been toying with pixel art as a drawing exercise lately. There’s plenty in common between drawing with pixels and cartooning. Both are exercises in abstraction and simplification…

You have to make things instantly readable with very little visual information. And as for character design, the process of drawing with pixels, in a constrained grid, emphasizes the importance of distinguishing features, body shape, silhouette, colour, and costume.

Filed under: abstraction.

Peanuts, Jul 18, 1963

“Meta.”

Interview with Paul Madonna

Paul does the great comic, All Over Coffee.

I never know what to call myself really. I call myself a cartoonist because it’s what I’ve wanted to do for as long as I can remember, it’s what I always return to, and it’s how I think. But I don’t really work in that field. I think I’m an artist and a writer, or more appropriately, an artist who writes.

As opposed to a writer who draws…