I'd like to state that my main influences as a cartoonist are Calvin and Hobbs (Bill Waterson), (The Far side) Gary Larson, Jim Davis (Garfield) and Giles.
I would spend hours poring over their books, Calvin and Hobbs actually shaping many of the events that happened in my childhood. Like pretending to be superhero even when I quite obviously had no powers, or creating a film noir detective agency which I self narrated (I will add I was quite a lonely child haha).
The brilliance of these artists is what made me want to draw all the time, in whatever form that took. The majority of the time I lacked the self confidence to create the comic epic that I desperately wanted to. My brother was by all accounts the 'artist in the family' and I was always blown away by his ability to draw and dismayed by his reluctance to share his talent. But that is the nature of sibling relationships.
I spent most of my childhood drawing enormous pitch battles between Forces of good and evil stickmen who transcended time and space in their mighty war. When I got to secondary school I met a young man who drew daft cartoons with absolutely no regard for quality or personal restrictions which was a huge influence on me and I followed his lead, filling books and books with linear mini stories of how a fat stick man would get killed by a variety of comedy props and bizarre set ups with terrifyingly elaborate machines of destruction.
Later on I began drawing more detailed comic strips, but the figures would be off model in every scene, the characters would be so anarchically drawn that they were impossible to follow. Self confidence again became a problem and these 'epics' would always end within 3-4 pages and eventually become lost or dog eared enough to show up on my mother's radar of what was considered rubbish.
When I started painting for myself it was because I was desperately lonely and my brother had moved onto other forms of art and that meant I could probably sneak into painting and drawing without too much brutal comparison, imagined or self imposed. My early paintings were quite 'cartoony' but with a Picasso influence which I felt gave them credibility. On the side I drew awkward mapped out paintings, and cartoon images alongside paintings I wanted to do but didn't have the skills to make the transition from illustration to paint.
I had a bad patch, personally, from about 2003 - 2007 where I continued to make terrible 'art', but the cartoons I drew in this period interestingly returned to the people and objects I drew as a child, the sense of child like perspective. while the garbage I was making at college was happening I was remembering without realising how I drew before I got all the learnt restrictions and self loathing. The subject matter tied in with everything else I was doing so the drawings were disgustingly graphic and unpleasant, but the basis was there.
Part of getting 'well' for me was to leave the grisly rubbish that I made in this period behind, which was not that simple. But it happened. Then I started painting again in 2008, which as part of my rehabilitation of myself I began drawing cartoon animals, and painting properly. Because I dislike painting human figures because I feel it limits my narrative boundaries to human interaction, I then began drawing daft cartoons as a relief from full time painting.
Soon I was actually desperate to do a cartoon strip and tried to make one called Mr. Salty's icecreamatorium. But it still had too much old input from my brain, so I started doing little drawings of my days events but always including a couple of muscly weight lifters to try and make it funny.
It was about his time that I was carrying a sketchbook in my back pocket to write down crap for my degree and after drawing a hamster called milky, I realised how funny hamsters could look if they were drawn as I saw them. That is were the dust piggies originated. And soon I was drawing them all over the sketch book. Soon they came into the drawings of myself and that was when the dust piggies began to be a bit of comic, although I didn't think of it as one until later.
Cartoons are an undeniable source of joy to me, to read them and to draw them. Where as I feel the need to paint but the relationship is fairly one sided as I rarely find work that I really like, let alone love. I can appreciate use of colour, texture, line and technical skill, but the personal relationship rarely exists.
I guess my point is that I love cartoons.
- from the roving mike of destiny.
