Tuesday, February 13, 2007

How To Be A Cartoonist

Before all the hoopla starts tomorrow (I don't mean Valentine's Day, I mean the Cybils announcements) I wanted to mention some news regarding the illustrator of one of the "long-list" nominees, Travels of Thelonious. Jon Buller has put up a cartooning tutorial at the website he shares with Susan Schade, Thelonious' author.

Jon says, "When I was a 4th grade cartoonist I used to love to pore over books
that shared the secrets of that craft. Recently it occurred to me that a short course in cartooning on the web might be a useful resource for librarians and teachers who encounter kids who are interested in cartooning. So I did a short introductory course on our website."

A few years back I used to draw with some of my younger relatives. We all had drawing journals. (One youngster didn't actually understand the concept of a journal and just sat down and drew a little picture on the center of every page. Then he was done.) Not being as creative as the other family members, I used to go to the library to get cartoon books for my journal work and try copying cartoons from newspaper illustrations.

If I had been in 4th grade when I was doing this maybe I could have gone somewhere with it. Unfortunately, I was older than that. A lot older.

Anyway, I don't think you need to be a kid to take advantage of Jon's short course.

1 comment:

Erin said...

Thanks for pointing this out!