So you’ve left your newspapers and book stuff at home, you need to take some notes, and all I you have is this week’s New Yorker, which your wife hasn’t read yet.

What do you do?

Whip out your Sharpie and defile the “Goings On About The Town.” (No one wants to read about all the great stuff they’re missing by living outside of Manhattan anyways.)

see it bigger

see it bigger

I prefer to think I’m just a man, not a poet part time, business man the rest….I’m no different from anyone else, just a run of the mine person. I like painting, books, poems. In my younger days I liked girls. But let’s not stress that. I have a wife.— Wallace Stevens

She said there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for but never did get to see.— Alice Munro, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

I just doodle until I find a character; you go with the one that has a certain little spark of life….After that, I really can’t force them to do anything. They know what they want to do if they’re strong characters. And they surprise you! If they want to do something, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.—James Kochalka

At last I do not know how to draw anymore!— Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) at the end of his life

Some doodles I’ve been doing with a brush and ink.

During the (still-in-progress) move, I came across these doodles that Lynda sent me as part of a letter. Everything she does inspires me to create, so I thought I’d share these.

My sketchbooks ebb and flow. Whenever I’m working non-stop on a project, my sketchbook suffers. Whenever I’m meandering, reading a lot, wondering what to do next, my sketchbook flourishes. Is there a correlation to my mental health? Almost certainly. Were food and shelter provided for me, I could be content to spend the rest of my days reading and doodling in a sketchbook, finished product be damned.

This afternoon I read Ivan Brunetti’s interview in Todd Hignite’s IN THE STUDIO. He was talking a lot about grids, and how if you put objects into a grid, they read as a system, or “pleasing geometry,” and viewers automatically start to structure them and find relationships between them. He pointed to this Kandinsky print as an inspiration:

He also related this “putting things into boxes” as part of his definition of cartooning:

The nature of cartooning seems inherently playful, having its roots in a playful kind of drawing, but because you’re putting things into boxes and organizing pages into panels and shapes of rectangles and circles, it automatically has an architectural quality, too.

I was talking to Dan Chaon a while back and he told me he uses an exercise with his students where he has them divide a piece of notebook paper into six “panels” and then instructs them to write scenes in each box. I really like this idea of looking at writing as merely a filling of black space. Lately, I’ve been playing with grids in my sketchbook pages:

(I’ve also been copying people’s work: the last five panels are ripped from the amazing Tom Gauld.)

I find that gridding gives way to lots of spontaneous doodling and gaglines…

I’ve also been trying to rip off Lynda Barry and treat my writing as calligraphically as possible–varying text sizes and styles within the same space. Brunetti had a great point in the interview when he said that cartooning wasn’t necessarily drawing, it was more like calligraphy or writing…writing with pictures, as Saul Steinberg would say.

Speaking of putting things into boxes, I can’t really keep a sketchbook at my desk at work, but we have all kinds of post-it notes around, so if there’s a bit of downtime and a flash of inspiration, I’ve been using the post-it as a panel, and doing a quick doodle. Jessica Hagy’s wonderful index cards have already captured the cartoon-on-mundane-office-supply market…but Meg thought these were pretty funny:

To loosen up in the morning, I pull off a huge sheet of trashy sketch paper and doodle with my sumi-e brush. Sometimes I copy cartoons out of other books, just to get the flow going. Sometimes I work on the easel, sometimes I work on the coffee table, sometimes I work on the floor in the sunshine…
I can’t express how elated we are to be finished with the GRE. Pythagorean triangles are no longer invading my dreams. Take that, ETS.

But oh, will it be a race to the finish line for the rest of the year. The wedding, the applications, the book…one thing ends, and twenty other things take it’s place.

We’ve got company coming this weekend, so we’re gonna spend it celebrating! You should too!

“Doodling is a 20th-century form….You had the rise of bureaucracy and meetings and the demise of the secretary who would take notes for you.”

- Sina Najafi, editor of Cabinet Magazine

- doodle by Richard Nixon

Doodling is also, of course, the result of cheap and plentiful pens and paper.

A chronic doodler myself, I’m fascinated by the idea that you could psychoanalyze people by their doodles.

Kurt Vonnegut called Nixon “the first president to hate American people and all they stand for.” His doodles don’t seem to render him any better. I mean, isn’t that doodle just terrifying?

Check out other doodles by ex-presidents.

I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible.—Sigmund Freud, talking about his dream diagrams

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I think I might use this someday as the epigraph for one of my comics. I collaged it onto the front of my sketchbook, with a few changes:

Clive Thompson made the great point, “your tools help determine how you think. So long as Freud used realistic modes of drawing, he was hemmed in by the dictates of straightforward physiology. To ponder the abstracts of human behavior, he needed to turn to abstract comix.”

Read some more about Freud’s drawings.

While browsing Drew Dernavich’s website (his woodcut-like comics regularly appear in the New Yorker), I came across a page labelled “Graphic Facilitation.” On this page, Drew has examples of drawings and charts he’s done in real-time, sometimes on foam board, sometimes on white board, to capture the content of lectures, business meetings, and conferences.

Now, I’ve been doing this kind of thing in my notebooks for a while now, but I never knew it had a name, let alone that it’s an emerging field. Check out Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation blog. There are registered Graphic Facilitators all around the country that are available for hire to “use visual learning to solve problems.” Here’s how to get started.