I have been asked how I come up for ideas for my cartoons.
A lot of people say they get their best ideas
in the shower.
That goes for me too...once I had this idea that
involved me,
an inflatable pool, 50 gallons of whipped cream
and the
entire cast of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion
Show. But I
digress. My point is, I don’t get productive,
feasible ideas
whist rubbing suds all over my body.
I’m not sure what all those scientist and inventors
do in the
shower to generate their Nobel-prize winning
ideas. All I can
figure is that there are two totally different
ways to shower
and I'm not doing one of them.
I get my cartoon ideas in the car. It usually
happens
in the stop-and-go traffic along the 40 mile
commute I endure
five days a week. I’ll be happily flying along
at 80mph
(that’s 178.4 hectacres per rod for my European
fans) when
an idea will strike me. Sometimes the idea is
“Slow the Hell
down -- traffic is stopped five feet in front
of you.” Other
times the idea is along the lines of, “Wouldn’t
it be funny of
Captain Hook was a proctologist.”
Ideas are fleeting, so I always write them down….usually
in
traffic. I scrounge around the interior of my
commutermobile
for a scrap of paper and a pen. After 5 minutes
of this futility,
I end my search and scrawl, “Captain Hook” and
“Proctologist”
on a KitKat wrapper with small piece of raisin.
For any of the
fine people in the California Highway Patrol,
I should stress that
this is done in the safest possible fashion,
with my hands never
leaving the classic 3 & 9 positions on the
steering wheel.
Every couple of weeks, I shovel out my car and
separate these
important creative kernels from the rest of the
junk that
accumulates during my commute. Easily half of
these are
incomprehensible scribbles. Of the half I can
read, only about
10% make any sense to me.
“Chicken buttcake.” Oh I’m sure that was a
hilarious gag when
I thought it up. Pity it makes no goddamn
sense to me now.
The few remaining bits of marginally comprehensible
inspiration
I have remaining, I jot down in a notebook. Sometimes
I’ll
include a rough (and I mean ROUGH) sketch.
Usually about Tuesday night, I realize that I
have nothing to
post for Thurday’s cartoon. So I thumb through
my notebook
and pick an idea. Then, using my two constant
companions from
college (beer and a #2 pencil) I create the first
real draft of the
cartoon. I ink the sketch with Sakura Micron
Pigma pens. These
are really kickass pens for line work. I've tried
a lot of others,
and I think these are the best. (Side note
– every cartoon for
2002 was inked with pens my Mother In Law
gave me for
Christmas. Thanks, MIL!)
After the ink dries, I scan the image as a bitmap
at 300dpi.
Why? Crap, I dunno. There’s probably a better
way to do it,
but how would I know what it is? Back in 1985
when I took
that semester of Art 1, Mr. Akana didn’t really
cover this topic.
I use Photoshop to convert the bitmap to a .psd
file where I
touch it up and colorize it using a Wacom tablet.
(Side note –
My Dad gave me the tablet. Thanks, Dad.)
The Wacom is the
single coolest piece of hardware I own. I strongly
recommend
that you skip this month’s car payment and use
the money to
buy a tablet. Here’s
a link to Wacom – check it out.
Once the art (if I can call it art) is done, I
save it as a 72 dpi .gif
and post it to mightywombat.com, where you, the
loyal Mighty
Wombat fan, can enjoy it.