Let’s jump straight in!

Earth to Moon.

First up, thank you to everyone who bought one of the hilariously long and impractical ‘Earth to Moon posters’!

When I drew the original comic (which you can enjoy here) I had assumed nobody in their right mind would want such a wildly impractical poster, and yet - the requests came in, and it’s ended up being one of my most popular posters! So, thank you for the push on that one!

(If you still want one, they’re available right HERE )

Show Time!

Along with fresh air and slightly cheaper pints, the ‘Agricultural Show’ is undoubtedly one of the best things about ostracising yourself to the countryside.

If you live in a major city, there are multiple things you can attend, spread out over the year; be it a culinary event, a concert or two, maybe a pop-up art show, or a design exhibition, there’s an endless schedule of options… Which is an incredibly inefficient and time-consuming way to live your life. You FOOLS.

Meanwhile in the countryside, we don’t have time fuck around. Here, you get ALL of these things, in ONE place, on ONE day.

Welcome to the Hadleigh Agricultural Show!!!

You want food? They’ve got every food truck in the county here. You want entertainment? How about someone on a motorbike doing back flips? Or perhaps a sheep show with dancing sheep? (I’m serious) You want Culture? Specifically AgriCulture? They’ve got Vintage machinery and Heavy Horses. You’ve got livestock competitions and flower and horticulture stuff, there’s an entire Fun Fair there and oh! You want Crafts? Oh, do they have crafts: There’s a whole dedicated rural crafts section! They’ve GOT IT ALL.

Yes, but do they have Art? OF COURSE THEY DO, and that’s exactly why I’m talking about it, because George and I both have multiple artworks entered into the Art Show!

Among other pieces, I’m sending in my second-longest artwork, which I miraculously found an affordable custom frame for! (Big Thank You, Skelf Frames!)

Most artwork in shows like this are usually paint on canvas, or beautiful illustrations and drawings, maybe the occasional sculpture. Which is why submitting some stick figures is always an interesting move. On the one hand, it provides a good injection of nonsense into the mix, but on the other hand, I don’t think I’ll be winning the art show prize any time soon (and if I do, there should rightfully be a protest) - that said, wish me luck!

The Cow.

Speaking of livestock, I recently had the joy of redesigning a new logo for a bar called The Cow, which I just have to share, because I’m really happy with it!

The idea here was to create an anthropomorphic cow that would become a versatile character, where we could then apply it to various activities and events happening at the bar.

I particularly like this version for the opening times poster:

I absolutely love this kind of work, so if you ever need a small bit of design work like this, do get in touch!

A Ziggy-Zeg-Aaaah…

I’ve saved the best till last…

Say hello to Ziggy!

Since Ziggy has been in our lives, dog-related content has had a massive uptick on Instachaaz, which to be honest, is really great because after many years of no longer dating or working in an office, my sources for relatable comedy were getting pretty low!

Not so anymore! Now I’ve got our darling Ziggy to inspire a whole new set of comics, so here’s a selection of those to round out this long-overdue edition of OUTLINED.

Next Edition:

In next week’s edition, we’ll presumably have “Chaz’s in-depth review of the Hadleigh Show”, and we’ll have all the news and happenings from the Art Show there! So you absolutely don’t want to miss that. Will I win the art prize? Will there be a protest as a result? Can sheep actually dance? Find out soon!

As always - if you’ve enjoyed this, please do subscribe! It’s FREE! (If you click the free option!)

Subscribe now

And of course, all the likes and comments always help, so please do jump in there if you feel so inclined!

Leave a comment

Share

Till next week.

To: Shareholders

From: Management

Subject: Update on the Recently Installed Office Guillotine.

While the installation of the notorious 18th-century beheading device initially raised eyebrows, those concerns were quickly cut short once the brutal efficiency of the machine was demonstrated.

In fact, a large portion of the team not only embraces the idea of the horrendous technology being present in an office environment, but have quickly developed an ardent enthusiasm for its use; routinely jostling for leadership roles, most notably that of ‘Lever Operator’.

Staff working hours have significantly increased, while requests to ‘head off early’ have completely ceased since the Enforced Morale Apparatus was prominently installed in the front foyer last Thursday.

The slick French-engineered upholder of efficiency has also increased competition within the team, and a kind of ‘inter-office head-hunting’ has quickly begun to take hold.

We have also noticed that clients have become significantly more agreeable to changes, and now settle outstanding invoices as soon as they’re received. They’re also requesting fewer meetings, particularly ones located in this office.

To: Staff

From: Management

Subject: Further Update on the Office Guillotines.

Following the success of the new truncating technology, it has since been decided to install more productivity devices in other parts of the office, namely the meeting room, the smoking area downstairs, and that corner where everyone stands around near the kitchen.

To: Staff

From: Janitorial Services

Subject: General tidiness.

All staff: Please remember to use the baskets provided. Thank you.

To: Staff

From: Recruitment

Subject: Open roles.

Due to a recent and dramatic reduction of management staff, all remaining staff are encouraged to apply for those currently open roles.

To: Catering

From: Management

Subject: Birthdays.

Please be advised that the office no longer has any interest or desire for cake.

Share

If you’ve got a spare 6 minutes, this Tom Waits narrated video about John Baldessari is wonderful.

And that’s it for now! With some of the suggestions for other artists already coming through, a Part Two is certainly in the mix!

And before I go, please do leave a comment or a like…

Leave a comment

…or even better, pass this one along to your biggest art nerd friend!

Share

See you next week!

If you’re not already signed up, you can do that right here:

Subscribe now

Hamlet.

Oh yes, we’re still on Shakespeare, which I fully realise I misspelled earlier this week about 2.5 seconds after I hit send out to a couple of thousand inboxes. Classic move by me.

Anyway, I was trying to find a way to use this guy again:

And so I went straight to one of the best-known Shakespeare scenes, ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ - AKA the ‘Guy talking to a skull’ scene.

Of course, at that point I realised I’m really just doing a joke about Hamlet rather than Shakespeare, so I wasn’t really reusing anything. But who cares, I was in it now…

I quite liked the above interrogation scene, but figured the scene preceding it might be a bit funnier.

Share

Subscribe now

Protests.

Urgh, yep - that horrible far right ‘free speech’ protest. Last week I saw multiple interviews of people at that protest, who all basically did variations of the following interview…

Injuries.

As someone who has the attention span of a hyperactive goldfish high on red cordial, I tend to have a very large pile of half-completed comics. Thankfully, since moving to a tablet, this pile is largely digital and therefore slightly easier to sift through.

Which is exactly what I did this week, subsequently finding some old work that I really should have stuck with.

This one, for instance, which I remember drawing after sustaining a knee injury while asleep.

I’m very sorry for not taking the time to draw that one up properly, but this is the all-new OUTLINED, and we do not care about such trivial things like ‘Quality’ and ‘Pride in our work’

Artists Doing Things.

Another project that I’ve had on the back-burner for I think about three years now is one called ‘Artists doing things’ and while the complete series will eventually be done, I thought I’d draw up one of my favourite ones this week…

ALSO! I finally remembered to do a screen record while I drew this one and so 44 minutes later, I ended up with not just the above comic but also a little process video.

Then, I sped it up significantly, popped some commentary over it, and now you can enjoy me talking and drawing way too fast!

And that brings us to the end of another week of OUTLINED!

Before I go, I should mention that I’m currently on the hunt for some new work, so if you’re someone in need of a comic, please do pop on ever to the recently renovated ChazHutton.com and check out some of my previous work there!

See you all next week!

C.

Subscribe now

This week we’re doing two posts, hence the Monday edition!

So, let’s get into it!

The Last Lighthouse.

Early on in the week I discovered this wonderful documentary from 1973 covering the Bishop Rock Lighthouse and the lighthouse keepers in charge of keeping it alight.

These days, the lighthouse is fully automated, although sadly it still doesn’t talk, which I’ve always thought would be an excellent improvement for any lighthouse:

That doesn’t sound like me…

There’s a quote by Shakespeare that goes ‘Ahoy-hoy, the very best way to make something ye’ve written quite funnier and wittier is to take whatever you’ve written and make it a lot more brief, like, use way less words to get your point across, know what I mean?’

Sorry, that’s obviously what Shakespeare wrote before taking that same advice and then penning the far more elegant line ‘Brevity is the soul of wit’

This approach often means lopping off some truly excellent (albeit entirely useless) writing that you’ve so lovingly crafted, a process that goes by the other big writing mantra, “Kill Your Darlings”.

It’s a hard process. For instance, last week while trying to come up with a comic that would hopefully offend a few people, I landed on this essay-length comic…

I showed this to George, who immediately pointed out it was way too long, and so after begrudgingly agreeing that she was totally right, I went and trimmed it…

This was much better I thought, and again I showed G who yet again stamped it with a big ‘Still Too Long’ Stamp - and so I went back to my desk, wondering just exactly when G had become an editor, and when she’d found the time to get a stamp made.

My next attempt involved pulling even more out, and shifting the nails comment to a bucket of nails in the scene, which, to be honest, felt way more sinister…

This one was finally met with a nod of approval from my discerning in-house editing council, and so the following comic finally made it to a full finished comic. (Although I did back off on naming the bucket of nails)

I’ve also just realised the builder lost his little hat along the way, which I really should have kept.

Recycling Romans.

My favourite part of the entire comic however, was these two guys:

…and after spending as long as I did drawing them and getting them just right, I figured I’d better find a way to use them again.

Of course, there was one very obvious place to send these guys; everyone’s favourite Roman era film:

In the end I spent even longer on Maximus’ outfit than I did the Roman guys, which now begs the question: Do I now need to find a new comic to put Maximus in?

And that’s not it for this week, see you again on Friday.

Until then, consider signing up or giving this a share!

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Ok, that’s enough chit-chat, let’s go.

The Moon!

First up, here’s the second time they landed on the moon…

No, seriously - That’s exactly what Pete Conrad said when he stepped off Apollo 12 to be the 3rd man on the moon.

I kinda love that after all the pressure of Apollo 11, the guys on Apollo 12 were having a whole lot more fun with it.

Another Flag, Another Island.

Next up, here’s a flag you’ve almost certainly never seen or heard of:

This is the flag for the ‘Islands of Refreshment’ - the name given to some extremely remote islands by John Lambert, self-proclaimed ‘Lord and Prince’ of the aforementioned islands and owner of an incredible mullet

The fact that the islands had already been claimed and named Tristan da Cunha, didn’t seem to worry him and he set up his micro-nation in 1811 with three other men.

Before we go on, this is how remote Tristan da Cunha is:

Here it is on a map…

For scale, this map could fit the entirety of Europe in it, if it were looking at that part of the world.

As such, Tristan de Cunha requires a bit more zooming out. You can now see it just…

As for what it looks like, here’s a drawing of it.

….and if you’re thinking “Chaz, there’s no way it looks like a cliched drawing of a volcanic island complete with mystical swirling clouds around the summit…”

…then you’d be very wrong.

Anyway, by 1812 Lambert and two of the other men had disappeared, leaving just one man, Thomas Currie, on the island. Currie claimed the other three ‘took a boat and left the island’ ostensibly to go fishing, and had never come back.

Which to be honest, sounds pretty suss.

As of this week, there are just 215 people on Tristan da Cunha, which for some reason has an incredibly up-to-date and very public census.

These days it’s a British Overseas Territory, with just one village called the brilliant “Edinburgh of the Seven Seas”, and even better: the only road outside of the village is hilariously named The M1.

I could go on and on about this place, and I definitely will in later editions (yeah, I can feel the subscriptions dropping off as I type that)

Speaking of which, time for a quick plug:

Ok - Back to it!

My New Favourite Whale.

The week I ended up reading way too much about one of the world’s few (and certainly the first) taxidermied blue whale, which currently resides in the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History.

It looks exactly like this:

It’s an absolutely amazing story about how it came to be. Which went something like this…

In short, the whale had a terrible time of it, and some time before (or quite possibly after) it finally died, it was bought by a guy called Wilhelm Malm who then towed it to Gothenburg and began the long process of preserving it.

Taxidermy is a fairly complicated process in general, so applying that process to an entire whale is a whole new level of complication. I highly recommend checking out this wonderful article from Cabinet Magazine about the whole process.

Once the whale was finished, they then decided to turn the mouth into a lid and build a little room inside the whale.

No, I’m serious. Atlas Obscura has some excellent pictures, but here’s a few of people enjoying a dinner party inside the whale.

And to wrap this up, I’ll leave you with my favourite photo, when they decided to move the whale to a different site - which required knocking down an entire wall.

And that just about brings us to the end this week’s edition!

Well done to everyone who made it this far. As always - please do share this if you think others might enjoy it! And of course, comments and likes and stuff all available below!

Share

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This week I found myself having a flick through this massive tome of a collection.

It’s always interesting looking through this archive because there’s certain comic set-ups that are used over and over again. One of the most famous is obviously the Desert Island set-up, which I’ve written about before:

The other thing you notice while looking back through 100 years of cartoons is how a lot of these cartoon set-ups have slowly died off owing to changes in the way we live.

The Complaints Window

For instance, ‘The Complaints Window’ set-up doesn’t seem to feature much anymore, largely because complaints windows don’t really exist anymore either. Which is a shame, because trying to make a comic about filling in an online complaint form doesn’t quite have the same punch.

Museums and Mummies.

I also noticed there seemed to be a lot more comics about Egyptian mummies, and while I don’t have the data to back it up it does feel like there’s less of those these days.

Anyway, I decided to draw one of my own after being inspired, and I must say - all those bandages are a pain in the arse to draw so I can understand why there’s maybe less of them!

This is one of those comics where the punchline works so much better written along the bottom rather than in a speech bubble.

The sarcophagus above was very much inspired by the Sarcophagus of Seti I, which if you’re in London you should go and check out - it’s in the absolutely bonkers John Soane Museum, possibly my favourite museum in London.

The entire museum is a crowded labyrinth of largely untitled artwork. It’s a mess, and it’s glorious. You can see a bit of the sarcophagus down the bottom there (As it turns out, despite it inspiring a comic I don’t actually have a photo of it) - anyway, do go check out the entire place yourself.

Drawing art that’s actually… good?

While thinking about museums and art galleries, I realised there’s a whole lotta fun stuff to make fun of there, and I really should do more art-based jokes. The only issue is, when you do a cartoon in an art gallery, you then have to come up with the art to put on the walls, which puts you in the suddenly very awkward position of having to create serious and considered art, for the sole purpose of making fun of it.

For this one, I chickened out and opted for a few flat colours. Shame on me.

Whales Where They Shouldn’t Be.

Another cartoon set-up I really love is a good Moby Dick cartoon, and the best of all of them has got to be this one by Gary Larson.

I think the best bit about this one, (and whale cartoons generally) is trying to fit a massive whale into a human world, which will always have some excellently comedic results. The fact Larson has drawn Moby Dicks’ car about an inch larger than the whale itself is just… (chef’s kiss)

For instance, Moby Dick writing up his own account has the added benefit of including the vision of a whale earnestly typing up a novel, which I just love.

And that’s where I leave you for this week!

As always, if you’re not subscribed already, you can do that here:

Subscribe now

Or, if you’re already subscribed, consider becoming a paid member and help support the creation of more wonderful nonsense!

See you all next week.

Comments, Likes, and Shares are all VERY MUCH APPRECIATED!

Thanks. - C.

Leave a comment

Share

So, the process behind last week's edition seemed to work well, so we’re sticking with it!

Who Doesn’t Want a Gun-Axe?

Last weekend I found myself wandering around the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and came across a cabinet of very old guns.

Within that collection of progressively larger and more outrageous blunderbuses, I found this glorious thing.

Yes, folks.. It’s a GUN-AXE.

50 percent gun, 50 percent axe, and 100 percent “What maniac needed this?!”

It also got me thinking: There really aren’t enough “Things that are also an axe” these days.

So, this week I took the liberty of sorting that out for everyone.

Broom Axe. This one feels obvious.

Rolling pin axe. Much less obvious.

Wine Axe feels like a great idea, provided you haven’t drunk all the wine.

Then obviously you’ve got an Axe axe…

(Also, very happy with my reflection work on those axe heads)

I had a lot more of these that I was going to draw but then I quite rightly thought “WHY?!” and so now we’re moving on!

A LinkedIn Comic. (I know, how utterly dull)

Earlier this week I kicked things off with a little LinkedIn comic.

Obviously, I put it on Linkedin, and it’s my hope that someone will discover it via the inevitable and completely nonsensical notification that comes their way.

But that’s enough about that meretricious hellhole of sycophantic career desperation.

What’s next?!

“It Giet Oan!” (It’s going ahead!)

(or rather, it’s probably not….)

This week I discovered an excellent sporting event, which, sadly, I might not ever get to enjoy.

The Elfstedentocht, is a long distance skating event held in Friesland, in the Netherlands, and involves racing along 200 km of natural ice on canals and waterways, of which there’s plenty of in the Netherlands.

Frustratingly, what there isn’t plenty of in the Netherlands is skatable ice, which is the other key ingredient to this race. The Elfstedentocht can only be held when all 200 km of the course has a thickness of 15cm, which is enough to deal with the 25,000 people who are likely to skate over it.

As a result, the race has only been held just three times in the last 60 years, in 1984, 1985 and 1997. They got very close to the race being held again in 2012, and every effort was made to cultivate as much ice as possible but sadly at the last minute it was deemed too unsafe to attempt, and so sadly the traditional cries of “It Giet Oan!” were silenced once again.

The saddest part is that climate change is likely to make an already unlikely event even more unlikely going forward, and there’s a big fear the race may never be held again.

On a lighter note, I mentioned the race is held in Friesland, which also has one of my favourite flags of all time.

Just look at that thing! It’s SO GOOD.

By the way, those red things are Seeblatts, not hearts!

And that’s it for this week!

If you’re not subscribed to OUTLINED - you can do that here:

Subscribe now

…and as always, here’s some options for commenting and sharing and stuff!

(Both are much appreciated!!!)

Leave a comment

Share

See you all next week!

C.

First up, The New Thing:

This week I’m trying something new!

I know, I know - I’ve tried multiple versions of a newsletter over the last 7 years, on multiple different platforms and to date, Not One has ever lasted, but DARE TO DREAM folks, hopefully this time I’ve hopefully cracked the code.

This time, the plan is designed to appeal to my complete lack of attention span.

…well, instead of sitting down and trying to do something in-depth, thought-out, and perfect each week, this new weekly edition of OUTLINED will exist as a live document that I’ll continually add to as the week progresses. Then, I’ll send out the result on Friday, No Matter What.

Yes, that is correct: It’s going to be a mad, chaotic mess.

No theme, no structure, just a series of short, sharp mini-chapters which, let’s face it, when you receive it on Friday afternoon, is all you really have the attention span for anyway.

For instance, this little explainer has been this week’s first thing.

Right now it’s Monday afternoon, let’s hope there’s more here by the end of the week!

Let’s Switch it up…

In the past, I’ve created very simple gif-like animations, but this week I ended up doing some animation work for a client that involved sound as well!

(This is just a small part of a much larger work, but I wanted to pop it in here)

The bit I’m most proud of though, is that after trying and failing to find the perfect mechanical clicking noise, I ended up just recording myself clicking my tongue, and unbelievably, it WORKED! (and on the first take too!)

So if all else fails, I might have a future career as a foley artist…

Who doesn’t love A Philosophy Paradox Joke?

While scrolling back through some drawing files on Wednesday I discovered a sketch for a comic I drew a while back, which never made the final cut. Possibly because Ship of Theseus jokes don’t tend to have a huge audience.

A Nerdy Flag Thing.

Check out this excellent flag I came across on Thursday.

If you’re thinking it kinda looks like the swedish flag but not, you’d be absolutely right. This is the flag of Åland, a little Autonomous archipelago halfway between Sweeden and Finland. (They’re part of Finland, speak Sweedish, and kinda do their own thing)

Let me tell you about this place. First of all, map-wise it looks like it should exist on the first page of a seven-part fantasy novel.

(I highly recommend zooming in on the full size version, it’s just wonderful)

I was going to try and draw this myself but drawing this place is near impossible: This entire archipelago is like an island fractal system, where each island has smaller islands, and those islands have their own smaller islands and so on and so forth seemingly down to individual rocks.

Seriously, give it a go, just keep on zooming in and watching more and more little islands and skerries pop up.

Oh, while we’re on that point…

A word I learned this week:

A ‘Skerry’

What’s a skerry you ask? This is a Skerry.

(I did warn you these new editions would be a rambling ADHD fever dream of tangents)

By the way, that’s a drawing of a very small rocky island, and not the floating turd it very much looks like.

Anyway! Where were we?

Åh yes, Åland.

An amusing mixup…

My other favourite part of this island is that they were granted a coat of arms back in 1560, but somewhere along the way things got mixed up with the very similar sounding provence Öland, and I kid you not, nobody actually noticed it until in 1944 during some heraldic revisions.

The fact that Åland had been happily using a deer as their coat of arms, despite having no such deer on the islands apparently didn’t seem to bother them.

Once the mistake had been discovered, Åland collectively went ‘Meh’ and decided to keep their incorrect coat of arms which apparently everyone was either fine with, or hadn’t really thought about anyway. Meanwhile, Öland was finally issued their proper coat of arms, with the addition of a nice red collar and some jazzy red antlers to differentiate themselves from those coat of arms stealing Ålanders.

Yes, this is where I end up a full hour after seeing a nice flag I didn’t recognise.

A Book I’m Reading…

A quick note on an excellent book I’m currently reading.

The Golden Thread: How fabric changed history by Kassia St Clair, is a wonderful read. It’s one of those excellent books that takes a singular thing like fabric and weaving and uses it as a vehicle to visit and dissect an incredible breadth of history, from the linen Egyption mummies were wrapped in all the way through to the design of spacesuits.

For example, what I didn’t realise until reading it was that vikings made their longboat sails out of wool, which doesn’t come to mind as the most obvious material for sailmaking, and certainly can’t have smelled very nice after a particularly rainy voyage.

And that’s it for this week!

I really hope you’ve enjoyed the new rambling version of OUTLINED, and with any luck it’ll continue on its way. Really looking forward to seeing what new nonsense arrises each week.

As always, please do give this a share and spread the word!

Share

And of course, please do give it a like and leave a comment.

Leave a comment

I’ll see you all next week!

Sometimes, the less you think about something, the better. At least, that’s what I told myself when I gave myself just two days to write and assemble a half-hour talk at Google Berlin last year.

This lack of time management was largely due to the fact I’d focused all my attention on the TEDx talk the week before!

In the end, I packed a deck full of as many slides as I could, and ended up with a surprisingly structured talk that drifts from nostalgic backstory to a portfolio show, and finally to a drawing tutorial of sorts. In short:

The Why, The What, and The How.

As such, I’ve divided it into multiple chapters so you can skip forward (or back) as you wish! (Or of course, simply sit back and enjoy the thing in full!)

Enjoy!

So, it’s taken a while to make it from the stage to being viewable online, but you can now finally view my TEDx talk!

Given the talk isn’t a cooking recipe, I didn’t see any point in putting it at the end of a long self-indulgent post, so here it is right here!

(Also, the mic doesn’t pick up the audience reacting and laughing, so you’ll have to do that bit yourself!)

Enjoy!

And, one more request - if you’d like to help spur the YouTube algorithm along a bit I’d LOVE it if you could click through to the video and give it a comment or a like on YouTube if possible! Thank you so much.

I’ll be back later this week with a longer post of the usual nonsense, see you then!

Right, that’s enough welcome back chat, let’s get straight into it:

This week I drew a little comic about desire paths.

Here’s a few I’ve taken photos of over the years…

At first glance, desire paths don’t really feel like anything. It’s simply just a well-trodden shortcut. But, once you know they’ve got a name, and are a whole thing, suddenly you’ll see them everywhere and they’ll start to represent a kind of mystical manifestation of human decision-making, designed by no single individual, yet designed and built by all.

These paths come in various forms, in most cases, they’re simply a diagonal shortcut, often a narrow dirt trail that’s been gradually excavated through a grassy lawn by thousands of busy footsteps all desiring to cut the same corner and save precious seconds on their trip to the shops.

What’s really interesting though is the people who might not have cut this corner if it weren’t for the existence of the desire path in the first place! (See? now it gets philosophical! Once you go down this path, there’s no turning back!)

I think my favourite version of this is the non-shortcut versions, the ones that don’t quite make sense at first glance, like this path tactfully and superstitiously walking around this power pole support…

The very idea of desire paths is such a strong concept that the lovely and talented has devoted an entire newsletter profiling people whose lives and careers have veered off on interesting desire paths of life.

You should absolutely go check that one out and jump on the subscription list!

Desire Paths

A newsletter about the lesson-filled lives of fascinating people. And other good stuff.

By Daniel Giacopelli

And so, if you didn’t know what they were before, now you do, and now you’ll notice them everywhere and do the same thing the rest of us do every time we see one…

So, onto the comic!

First up, here’s the initial sketch idea for the comic:

So, let’s do a ‘behind the drawing’ kinda analysis here.

There’s always a danger with a comic as big as this. It’s TWELVE DRAWINGS! Nobody has that kind of time, which is why it sat on my desktop for about four months until eventually I had another job big enough to avoid which caused me to finally do this one in a desperate fit of procrastination.

(Yes, I am still avoiding that job by writing this post)

But, moving on! In retrospect, I think a strong inspiration for this comic is undoubtedly R Crumb’s ‘A Short History of America’, which redraws the same scene as it slowly progresses through decades of gradual, inevitable and depressing development.

(It wasn’t until looking it up that I realised that I’ve also opted for the twelve images in a 3 x 4 grid arrangement as well!)

The great thing about doing this kind of drawing is that you’re essentially redrawing each panel based on the one before it, and so once you’ve found the energy to draw the first panel, the rest of them tend to come about with relative ease, until eventually, you end up with a complete comic:

Thankfully, after four months of procrastination and all the hours of drawing and colouring and shading just the right colour for ‘a path that isn’t a real path, but now isn’t a path but you can still just kinda see it’ I finally posted it and thankfully it’s turned out to be quite popular and well worth all the effort.

Also, one last thing before I go. CHECK OUT THE DETAIL ON THE BIN!

This bin didn’t need to look anywhere near this good, but I put a few highlights in, and then some nice shading and suddenly I was cross-hatching the inside and ended up drawing what I strongly suspect to be the best bin I’ve ever drawn. Exciting stuff! what a start to the year!

Oh, and before I go - the comic is now available as a poster should you work in a council office and are looking for some wall art! You can find it here.

If you’d like to receive more exciting stuff like the philosophy behind a non-descript dirt track or me bragging about a very well-drawn bin, you should sign up to OUTLINED and get it all straight to your inbox! - You can do that here:

Other than that - as always, leave comments or give this thing a share and I’ll be back soon with a new edition!

Leave a comment

Ok, not nobody, I’m sure there’s some weirdos and psychopaths who’ve done it so much it all feels completely natural to them. But for the vast majority, even those who feel comfortable on stage, there is a strange disconnect between the words coming out of their mouth, and the way those words are heard by the audience in front of them.

I’ve done speeches where my body spent the entire duration in a weird state of low oxygen, as if I was constantly in need of a full inhale of breath I could never quite find, like a recently caught fish bouncing around on the stage, begging to be thrown back into the audience. Yet afterward, the audience reassured me I sounded completely normal and (surprisingly to me) quite confident and not a fish.

I’ve had other talks peppered with embarrassing slip-ups and mistakes, all of which later turned out to be entirely missed by everyone listening.

People say nerves are good for this kind of thing. As if all that awkward stressed-out energy is a little oratory superpower and not a massively debilitating affliction. I assume those same people tell you it’s good luck when a bird shits on you. No no, it’s ok to tell those people, well-meaning as they are, that they’re absolutely wrong.

Having done a few big talks recently, I have discovered a savior, one that can be found in the audience.

You will hopefully find them early. They’re in the first few rows, below the glare of the lights, and they’ve made the mistake of laughing at your first terrible joke and now you’re going to focus on them and them alone, the one person who you can rely on to give yourself the feeling you’re talking to a sympathetic audience of just one.

I got to thank one of those people after a recent talk. It was in Berlin, a city that wears mostly black, yet this man in the second row was wearing a bright plaid shirt and had a huge smile and what felt like a bigger face than everyone around him. He was glorious, and as soon as my gaze found him, the rest of the room faded into darkness and it was just me and him…

Until I got self-conscious and wondered if everyone else was now wondering why I was obsessively serenading a complete stranger I’d creepily decided to zero in on.

For my TEDx Mitte talk, which I was honoured to have the opportunity to do, the organisers arranged a coach for everyone. My wonderful coach Olaf advised that I plant my feet, stay front on, and fully engaged with the audience.

This was great advice, which you should also follow, but for a man who is prone to nervous dancing and a natural pose of putting all my weight jauntily on one leg like an over-energetic pirate mid-jig, it was advice that I would find impossible to maintain.

In many ways, a talk operates the same way as a well-worded article or opinion piece: Bring the audience in, hold their attention, and then leave them with something to take home with them, be it a newfound interest or the need to incite a riot.

In this article, you’ve come to that very point. The point where you assume I’ll offer you a considered, insightful message that will make that upcoming wedding speech or presentation all the more easier…

And the truth is, I’ve already told you everything you need to know to succeed: Nobody doing this ever feels like they’re doing it well, so just plant your feet, gasp for air, plough on through your perceived mistakes and realise that you’re not a fish and that everything that comes out of your mouth sounds completely different (and so much better) than you think.

Break a leg.

I’ll be back next week, with the loooooong awaited Part 3 of The Exhibition saga!

Here’s Part 1 if you wanted to catch up! -

Also, after reading the comments on the Instagram post for this comic, I decided to add in a few extra totes that people suggested!

Leave a comment

Share

UPDATE!

I figured you can’t make a post all about tote bags and not put it on a tote bag!

So, that’s now a thing that exists! You can buy that here.

Right now, I SHOULD be packing up my house because I need to be out of it by Monday, which is offensively soon.

This would normally be fine, however my packing process currently looks something like this…

…but in my case, ALL the boxes are half full and have their contents strewn everywhere…

Where am I off to you ask?

BASICALLY NOWHERE!

The new place is just a 10-minute walk away, (the idea of walking everything over bit-by-bit has occurred to me). Given there are four flights of stairs in the new place, this would essentially constitute a kind of cross-fit session, but one that actually serves a purpose.

However - back to what I came to talk about!

MAPS!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a map special and now that I’ve recently started drawing custom maps, (more on that later) - I figured I’d dip back into them.

First up this week is a little map I drew for Uber UK.

This next one is BARELY map-worthy, but I’m going with it anyway! There’s been a lot of talk in the news lately about pedestrianising Oxford Street, (something that seems to happen every few years).

While it’s the obvious thing to do for that street, the idea that more tourists would then be able to fit in there is a horrifying thought to any Londoner, who is likely to avoid it even more than they already were. (which is to say, somehow go there a negative number of times?)

As always, there’s the passionately aggrieved group of anti-pedestrianisation people who always seem hyper-fixated on delivery vehicles and taxis. To them, I’d say that if a bunch of those weird American candy stores have to close down because their candy truck can’t get in, it might not be the end of the world.

Here’s my take on Pedestrianisation in an article for Atmos some time ago…

However, let’s get on to the fun stuff!

(I wanted to put more map stuff in, but I’ve got a house to pack folks!)

I’ve recently started getting back into drawing maps!

Years ago, I made a map of London for my friends Pav and Gal, (Well, Pav and Gal’s specific corner or London anyway!)

Drawing this at the time was a lot of fun, and (ridiculously) back then I also did this all by hand!

During my chaotic pack-up, I even found my little grid guide that I slipped in behind my page to maintain a consistent angle and sizing of each building! - How quaint!

These days, I’m a little more technologically advanced, and so the task is now significantly faster! Which is why I’ve decided to BRING BACK the maps and offer up some Custom Made Maps - just in time for Christmas Gift Buying Season!

(it really is the perfect gift for the I-never-know-what-do-get-them Person)

Of COURSE, for all you lovely Outlined subscribers I’ve included a little thank you discount! - and not just for maps, but EVERYTHING!

20% OFF - All Products!

Just hit that button, or put in OUTLINED-01 at the checkout! - The offer is only available this week, So be sure to get on to that!

Looking forward to drawing some of your local towns and cities!

Other Stuff.

For those waiting for Part 3 of the Exhibition saga, that’ll be coming next week once I’ve dragged my entire life a few blocks away.

If you missed the first two installments, you can find them here: Part One and Part Two.

Also! BIG NEWS ALERT! I’m talking at TEDx Mitte next month! (I know right?! whaaat?) - but I’ll pull together a more detailed post all about it, because it does feel like a bigger deal than a note at the end of an email!

For now though, here’s the official speaker announcement! Woo!

You can check out the rest of the event here.

And That’s It!

So, don’t forget to jump on that discount, and give this thing a share or leave a comment (LOVE the comments!) and I’ll see you all next week from the new flat!

Leave a comment

Share

Why not, right? I mean, I’ve been drawing them for a number of years now so I might as well have a look at where all this idiocy started.

Generally, ‘Comics’ as you know them now, fall under a thing called ‘sequential art’ which as the name suggests is art, but it’s all sequential, which sadly doesn’t mean it’s covered in sequins, but is rather composed of a series of panels intended to be read in sequence.

Before newspapers and magazines (and printing in general) hit the scene, this art form was mainly confined to ornamental design on buildings and various monuments; the most well-known surviving example is the outrageously narcissistic Trajan’s Column in Rome.

As far as columns go, it’s really, quite impressively big. (you can look at it in detail here) There’s a copy of it in one of the biggest rooms in the V&A Museum in London, and even then they had to lop it in half just to fit it all in. All told the entire thing is about 35 meters tall, which is around the height of a ten-story building, and coiling continuously all the way up this thing is a detailed pictorial history sculpted into its marble sides.

The column was commissioned by a guy called Trajan, the Emperor at the time, and the story it tells (in typical Roman style) is all about how Trajan roundly defeated some people called the Dacians (you don’t need to know much about them, other than that they used to live in Dacia, which is mostly where Moldova and Romania are now and they had some pretty good beards).

The thing is, as beautiful and amazing as the design of this column is, as far as understanding anything on it was concerned it’s almost entirely useless. While the first few rings of the story are easily visible from the ground while you elbow another tourist aside, as the story gradually moves higher up the column the intricately carved figures become harder to see, until the entire thing blurs together into incomprehensible noise.

If anything, the designers really should have built this thing sideways, and possibly had it slowly rotating like a big classical marble spit-roast (for a civilisation that invented plumbing, surely this would have been possible).

Of course, Romans being Romans wanted something a bit more grand and rather than creating a practical educational tool shaped like a spit-roast, and opted instead to create what is essentially a very large, unreadable middle finger directed at whatever was left of the recently vanquished Dacians.

Another notable example of sequential art is probably the Bayeux Tapestry, which isn’t a tapestry, and probably wasn’t made in Bayeux. Much like Rome’s big marble ‘Fuck You’ to the Dacians, the tapestry follows the events of a battle, in this case, The Battle of Hastings in which William the Conqueror brought over a whole lot of new words to England and killed quite a few people in the process.

The entire thing is about 70 meters long, which makes it a bit of a struggle if you’re planning on reading it in bed.

As far as these two bits of sequential art go, they weren’t the most comedic affairs. Although, to be fair, whoever made the Bayeux tapestry had a bit of fun, the scene where King Harold cops an arrow in the face is captured in all its glory.

On that note: It’s not entirely clear if he did receive an arrow to the head, other sources mention that a few of his limbs were chopped off, and there’s speculation that someone might have received a demotion for cutting off his penis (which is fair enough I guess as far as ‘reasons for demotion’ go).

There’s also other stuff on the tapestry that people are still a little confused about, namely this panel of a cleric smacking a woman in the face while a man does a naked crab-core dance apparently under the floorboards.

Nobody really knows who the woman Ælfgyva is, or why she’s being assaulted by a Cleric, much less the naked man underneath. There’s a good chance that after drawing the first 35 meters of the thing, the embroiderer just got a little bit bored and started adding in a few misogynistic filler panels, if only to keep the editors on the ball, which evidently, they weren’t.

Full-blown satire didn’t really hit the art form until a guy named William Hogarth arrived on the scene. A guy so good at this kind of thing that this kind of thing is now often called ‘Hogarthian’ and London deemed him famous enough to name a roundabout after him (which is a big deal in London).

Here he is with his pug.

Hogarth and his pug were hanging out in London during the 18th century, initially working as an engraver (just him, not the pug) but quickly began doing his own thing. It was after returning from a trip to France during which he was arrested under suspicion of being a spy that he painted one of his earliest pieces of satirical work, or more accurately, a fairly xenophobic ridiculing of the French.

O the Roast Beef of Old England (‘The Gate of Calais’) 1748, takes a massive piece of roast beef as a symbol of British wealth and power, and surrounds it with a bunch of offensive French caricatures. It also stands as possibly the only piece of British art celebrating roast beef, a fact that any British roast beef and/or art historian should be very disappointed by. (Here’s a more detailed description of everything going on in the scene)

As far at the road to today’s standard comic arrangement goes, it’s Hogarth’s more well known work that could be viewed as a kind of early proto-comic at the very beginning of that road.

A Harlot’s Progress, consisting of six panels, shows the story of a young woman who moves to London, becomes a mistress, falls into prostitution, does a stint in prison, before eventually dying of venereal disease leaving behind a young child and not much else.

Admittedly, not as funny as his tongue-in-cheek French bashing material, but the satirizing of London’s gradual urban decay at the time was viciously unforgiving. He followed it up with a second series, ostensibly a similar story but from a male perspective, entitled A Rake’s Progress. You can still see the original paintings of this series over at the incredible Sir John Soane Museum, which might just be London’s most underrated tourist attraction.

These sequences in turn set up a style of illustration that The Glasgow Looking Glass began utilizing almost 100 years later in 1825, and which has, relatively recently, been pinpointed as the first bona-fide comic in the modern sense. The Glasgow Looking Glass was published by a guy called William Heath, who eventually closed down the publication after only a few years, apparently due to having to leave the city thanks to a bunch of debts he’d managed to run up in various drinking establishments; a situation I’m sure Hogarth would have satirised were he still alive.

Before the publication did come to an end however, Heath managed to fill it with drawings satirising the events happening at the time. These drawings included some new additions that are now fairly common in regards to comics, namely the use of speech bubbles, and also the now ubiquitous “To Be Continued” sign-off, the same of which can hopefully be said about this article.

As always, do give this some likes or leave a comment!

Or, even better - give it a share! Here’s some buttons for all that…

Share

Leave a comment

Share Outlined

However, despite their rampant proliferation, these diminutive digital artworks deserve far more examination and consideration than we generally offer them.

So, of those 3790 glorious little pixelated pictures, here’s a closer look at just five of them.

What does the empty airplane seat say about the loneliness of travel? Here we sit together in the pressurised cabin, flying across cultures, centuries of accumulative existence between us, yet staring ahead, steadfastly refusing to experience our shared loneliness together. The single airplane seat is our cage, simultaneously a prison of our loneliness, while also acting as our protector, shielding us from the experience of fellow prisoners suffering the very same enduring fate.

The now ubiquitous smiley face, once simply a colon and single parentheses, could its simplistic and primordial form have had any idea of the rampant digital proliferation it would soon endure? As we stare into its agonisingly stretched, hollow, and void-like eyes, what horrors we wonder are being obscured behind this benign, smiling facade? Not even the advanced ancestors of this symbolic digital visage will ever know, for it is a mystery now, even unto itself.

At first appraisal, a simple aubergine, famed for its ability to substitute meat in vegetarian cooking; it has now come to provide a similar substitution in the extensive, yet crucially limited emoji vocabulary of sex. What does this duality of symbolism mean? And how does this dichotomy manifest? Especially if we are to consider the humble aubergine farmer, trying and failing to write an emoji text to his date. We must wish him well.

This practical piece of human anatomy may have retained a reputation for keeping the brain intact and holding together its owner’s face, if it weren’t for the fact the face has an uncanny ability to disintegrate soon after death. As such, once cruelly exposed, this wonderfully useful construction of bone now represents the very thing it protected us from for so long. What a cruel injustice indeed. But, all is not lost, for our humble skull is now finding new life in its digital form, as recognition of hilarity so powerful as to be life-ending, and therefore finally being granted the levity and joy it has always deserved.

The boarded-up abandoned house, at first glance simply a victim of neglect, but in truth a visual indicator of a much larger decay. What intolerable economic situation forced the last occupants of this home to leave? What potential fate necessitated its doors and windows to be so vigorously and haphazardly boarded up? Yes, this decrepit building is much more than just an abandoned home, it’s a symbol of systematic failure, of an erased community, of a brutally unrealised dream. All that we can be sure of is that it will find no solace once it’s inevitably and enthusiastically converted into a high-end boutique coffee shop next year.

So, where do we start?

The Shower.

Because big thoughts always happen in the shower.

While standing under the surprisingly impressive Berlin water pressure, with just a week before the opening, I started thinking about doing two more completely new pieces. (Because that obviously makes sense)

The first thing I was thinking of was this one…

But more on that later… (Oooh teaser for Part 3!)

The other one I was thinking about was this comic I drew a while back…

And while shampooing my beard, I had a “WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS EARLIER?!” kinda thought…

Surely, I thought, there are blank jigsaw puzzles you can buy!

And if so, could I conceivably recreate this drawing as an actual jigsaw puzzle?

Well, folks… THERE ARE! and I was pretty sure I could!

And so I jumped online and made a deal with the devil, and the devil said they do next-day delivery, and then it turned out I had a subscription with the Lord of Darkness so shipping would be free as well, which when you’re on a ONE-WEEK-TO-GO kinda schedule is exactly what you want to hear (and that’s how he works I guess)

And the next day my lovely blank little pieces all arrived!

The only issue was, at 4x6 they weren’t even close to the right size, so I began a kind of jigsaw piece organ harvesting operation, using multiple sets to gradually build up a Frankenstein’s Monster of the required 8x8 arrangement.

The next challenge was applying colour. I figured that would be easy and some blue markers would be perfect.

They were not.

No matter I thought! I could just paint over the top…

This idea also turned out to be terrible.

At this point, I decided it was probably time for another shower.

And so, I was forced to do it the hard way, by meticulously painting each piece individually, three coats each, sanding the edges, and carefully reconstructing the entire thing.

I was also forced to admit that my girlfriend, who’d suggested this method from the very beginning, had been absolutely right all along.

And so I got to work…

I’ll be honest, looking at a nifty little slideshow of the process makes it look a lot easier than it was.

“BUT CHAZ” I can hear you ask, “How on earth did you keep track of where each piece was supposed to go in the jigsaw?!”

Well, I’m glad you asked…

I know right? I’m basically Arty Alan Turing.

What was great about all this extra work is that I only had something like 4 days left until the exhibition opening.

Thankfully though, I managed to get the real thing looking incredibly similar to the original drawn version. Just look at this side-by-side!

All that was left was to find a frame, and then work out a complicated system of double-sided tape and mounting which isn’t interesting enough to put in here, but rest assured it was (unsurprisingly) far more complicated than I anticipated.

And unbelievably, with just days to go, it was finally done!

It seriously is one of my favourite bits of work and easily the one I’m most proud of!

(I’ve since got the process a little more under control these days and you can now purchase your very own version. I’ll even do them in different colours!)

And that’s it for this episode of “Chaz’s Mad Dash To Make All The Art in Time” - In the next installment, we’ll find out why buying the biggest frame you can find and then working out what to put in it isn’t necessarily the smartest idea.

And yet… that’s exactly what I did.

As always - please do leave a comment or a like if you enjoyed this, and if you haven’t already - please do subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

Or, if you’re already a subscriber, consider switching up to a paid member and supporting more of these terrible decisions that occasionally work out!

Leave a comment

Share

…and also farewell to anyone for whom this update will serve as a useful reminder to finally unsubscribe! - honestly, I Get It - This wonderful little newsletter has been slightly forgotten of late, so I wouldn’t hold it against you!

(On the plus side, now is your chance to unsubscribe guilt-free!)

RIGHT! - Now that that’s out of the way, gather around my handful of remaining subscribers, and let’s get stuck into this long overdue update!

First up…

The Exhibition!

Yuuuup! After doing for this thing for 8 years or so, I FINALLY got around to getting some stuff up on a wall and telling people to come and look at it while drinking wine.

Of course, it wasn’t just me - in fact, I wouldn’t have done any of this if it weren’t for the amazing Anne Derian, who I teamed up with for this exhibition.

…which was our first hurdle.

You see, Anne and I have very different styles of art…

So our first task was to find a common denominator for our art, (which has absolutely nothing in common)

In the end, we realised we both have backgrounds in Architecture and to a degree, it might have been Architecture that led us both to where we are now.

And so, an exhibition was born!

We even retained our individual styles by splitting the flyer straight down the middle.

Once we had the date and place locked in (more on that later), so began two months of almost non-stop work, churning out as much art as possible before the big opening.

Fittingly, I hadn’t worked this hard and furiously since Architecture School. At a certain point, I was taking breaks to ice my drawing hand which was starting to resemble a gnarled and haunted uprooted tree.

When my hand was operational, I realised creating art for an exhibition opened up a whole new world of possibility and potential fun, like demanding that people buy my art, but making that art…

I also realised the exhibition might be a good opportunity to solve some other current issues in my life, which is how this piece came about…

Then of course I thought I’d better put some Berlin-specific comics in, which is how I ended up spending an entire afternoon drawing thirty very slightly different wheely bins.

Actually… I got stuck right into drawing bins. Even the iconic Berlin orange bin made an appearance…

Or what about the German language? Surely that should get mentioned in the exhibition I thought, (After all, it rarely passes my own lips, so it’s the least I could do for a Berlin-based exhibition)…

And so, the opening date very quickly got closer and closer…

But then…. Disaster.

Of all things, FOOTBALL.

While we’d been diligently working away, the The UEFA European Football Championship, aka The Euroes was being held in Germany.

This hadn’t been cause for concern, but just a week before the exhibition Germany would win against Denmark, thereby sending Germany to the quarter-final which was being held not only the same day as our exhibition but at the exact hour as well.

If it was any other country, we’d be fine! - but Germany getting in, would mean that at 6 pm on July 5th, the last thing 90% of Berlin would be doing was standing in a small gallery looking at meticulously designed art and stick figures.

At this point however, it was too late to change the dates and so we carried on, hoping that the majority of our arty guestlist didn’t like football that much…

And that… for now, is where I’m going to leave it…

Will the exhibition happen? Will the people turn up? Will my mangled hand go back to a normal-looking hand? Who knows?! All will be revealed in the next installment!

Till then…

This is a Droodle:

Confused? Intrigued? Great, let’s get into it!

‘Droodles’ were a syndicated visual riddle created by Roger Price back in 1953. Here he is with a whole book of them.

And here’s the caption (answer?) you needed for that one above.

Apparently the idea was that it was the kind of thing one could draw on a cocktail napkin to break the ice in the kind of bar in the 1950’s that had cocktail napkins. (And presumably a jazz band and Don Draper being horrible.)

The riddles became quite popular, and as well as spurring a book, were also turned into a TV show, which just proves how much easier it was pitching a concept for TV back then.

I still remember a primary school teacher drawing this one on the whiteboard during class…

They also drew a similar one called ‘Dolly Parton walking past a window’ which to mind really wasn’t appropriate for a class of 10 yr olds, but then again it was the mid 90’s, and as far as retrospectively questionable stuff from that era goes, that’s pretty tame.

Fast forward several millennia, and Droodles again popped up in my life, this time as part of a post on Instagram, which thankfully gave them a name, and also their aforementioned creator Roger Price.

After a bit more research, I discovered the artist Agostino Carracci also used to draw similar riddles back in the 16th Century, like this one for example…

…but the, let’s say, standardisation and naming (and from what I can gather, trademarking) of the art form is all down to Roger Price.

After their heyday in the 50’s and 60’s, Droodles fell off the radar for a while, only to be picked up and revived somewhat by Frank Zappa, who put one on an album and named it as such:

Which more or less brings us up to speed.

As a comic artist whose natural state of being is ‘not actually drawing anything’ — I’m always appreciative of a useful prompt or challenge to get my creative engine up and running (Coffee only gets you so far…)

As such, I was immediately interested in giving Roger’s visual riddles a go for myself. I mean… how hard could it be?

Dear reader, it is a LOT harder than it looks.

So let’s get started. Yes, you’re playing along at home with me. Get yourself a cocktail napkin (or paper if you must), a marker, and let’s do this!

First of all, we needed to start with a nice square border.

There’s something very satisfying about a constraint, and as counterintuitive as it may sound, it has the effect of amplifying creativity rather than diminishing it.

That’s right: In short, start thinking inside the box.

That said… My first attempt was TERRIBLE.

Now while I love the idea of a klutzy, over-familiar iceberg accidentally causing a disaster, this was very much not in the spirit of a Droodle (the way Roger would have wanted it anyway)

So, attempt number two…

To recalibrate, and to get into Roger’s creative mind, I decided to study some of his previous work and realised that his good droodles relied on confusion, but his best droodles relied on misdirection.

For instance, is this a freeway leading into a tunnel? Certainly looks like it…

Nope! this is ‘a spider wearing a beanie.’

After a bit more study of the old classics, I also realised angles seemed to pop up (or sometimes down) quite a bit, so I started with a few angles…

Of course, my brain immediately went to one of the world’s most obvious angles…

It was only a week later, while searching for a photo of one of Roger’s Droodle books that I discovered Roger had more or less done exactly the same joke decades earlier!

So I was certainly on the right track! What about two angles I thought? A chevron if you will… Where in the world would you see that classic V shape?

At this point, I was suddenly aware that I’d hit another level. In my pursuit to emulate the late great Roger Price, had I finally stumbled upon the key to it all?!

What if I drew the droodle first, without actually knowing the answer?

So I started big. X marks the spot.

Now, I just had to write the answer.

I’ll admit, having drawn something and then post-rationalising it is a thrill I’ve not had since studying architecture.

I’ve also never had to come up with a joke after I’ve drawn it, so thank you for that Roger.

Here’s a couple…

We could also get more surreal…

Wait, here’s another one…

So, moving on! While we’re on snakes, the other thing I realised with some of Roger’s work is that certain animals feature frequently.

I’ve already mentioned spiders, but there’s many others that work well — provided they either have multiple legs, or none at all…

Side note: That’s either a massive slug or a miniature book

But where to from here?

Because here’s the thing… Roger died in 1990, and as far as I can tell only produced work in black and white, which suddenly opens up the door of possibility for us…

So, first of all — TECHNOLOGY

What if we carried the art form into the present day with a few Droodles that would have made no sense whatsoever in the 50’s and 60’s?

or… how about COLOUR?!

Now… I know bringing colour into the mix here might go against everything that Roger stood for with his Droodles. However, I feel if we restrict it to just one colour, it still retains the original idea of maximum simplicity…

It how about….

Droodles also always seem to be just singular drawings, in all my searching I didn’t encounter any that relied on a two-image joke…

And, I know I said to think inside the box, but all art rules must be broken, (that’s a rule). So here’s one more for you before I go…

…and on that empty canvas note, over to you! Get yourself a marker, some paper and have at it!

As always - Plese do leave your comments, and likes, and share this and all that kinda stuff!

Leave a comment

Share

One More Thing!

In just a little over two weeks I’ll be doing an exhibtion in Berlin, and so I’m in the process of madly putting everything together for that! - The next few posts will hopefully be a front row seat into the maddness of that (and with any luch a catchartic outlet for one very stressed out artist!) - So, that’s all headed your way soon!

C.