I’ve decided that I’m not busy enough, and so have begun an informal cartooning course, courtesy of master cartoonist Ivan Brunetti. Within a week of starting this project I have already noticed marked improvements in my closeness and decisiveness of mark making. Incredible stuff!]

1.1- So- onwards and upwards! The first exercise was tricky, and my hands were clumsy. Gotten loosen up the digits (and the brain)! The goal was to draw 5 different things 6 times each, without pausing, with a subsequent reduction in time limit for each iteration. The idea is to find a way of drawing quickly while still keeping the image clear and readable. My favourite iterations take place around the 15 second mark- any longer than that and I’m making unnecessary additions (at this size, anyway).

1.25- The second exercise involved drawing a full page of known characters from animation/comics etc at 10 seconds each, from memory. These were performed quick-fire, one after the other, with names added later (I realise some of them are fairly abstracted takes on the real versions!)

1.3- This took me a few days from start to finish, as I worked on it around normal tasks and I needed time to regenerate the thinking muscles! The task was to draw up around 100 little grid squares and at no more than 5 seconds each draw whatever word/emotion/characters etc comes to mind. This was tough, and in many of them I took longer than 5 seconds but no longer than 30 seconds.

The last exercise in block one is kind of a reward for the work in the first few tasks, where I was able to reconnect with the joy of mindless doodling- something I haven’t done in a long time. Just a page of whatever comes to mind. However it looks, the process- mindless doodling- was a ton of fun. A reassuring feeling that I haven’t fully connected with in a while. (The drawing was done quite lightly and so I’ve had to darken it up in Photoshop adding the white bg and black outlines to make the image a little clearer.)

The exercises continue, stay tuned!