Shifting Gears

For a long time my draw­ing work has been done with pre­cise tech­ni­cal pens and lots and lots of cross­hatch­ing. I’ve done very lit­tle in the way of loos­en­ing up into a more car­toony style. So when I was approached by the Life’s Work Cen­ter to cre­ate a sin­gle-frame car­toon to accom­pa­ny an arti­cle in Open Exchange (one of the local free newsprint mag­a­zines), I was­n’t real­ly sure I should take the assign­ment. I like Tom and the pro­gram they have at LWC quite a bit, and I did­n’t want to leave him hang­ing. It was a quick-turn­around dead­line piece and it would have been very dif­fi­cult for him to have found some­one else over the hol­i­day week­end. Besides, the mon­ey would­n’t hurt and hey, what could I pos­si­bly be think­ing? Not take the assign­ment because I’d have to work in a dif­fer­ent style? So instead I’d have to do that much more pro­gram­ming? How does writ­ing code relate to my style? This was an illus­tra­tion gig, and it land­ed right in my lap.

The Life’s Work Cen­ter’s pro­gram uses Richard Bolles’ What Col­or Is Your Para­chute? as a start­ing point and takes the par­tic­i­pants in a group set­ting through a series of tasks designed to reveal the things that he or she is best at and finds most ful­fill­ing. There is some atten­tion spent on the process of find­ing a job once that ide­al is uncov­ered, but LWC is much more inter­est­ed in putting its par­tic­i­pants on the right track rather than just pro­vide coach­ing aimed at land­ing a job what­ev­er it is. LWC is an excel­lent resource if you’re look­ing for a career, not just a job.

One of the best parts of this assign­ment was spend­ing the day in the stu­dio. I went in on a week­day morn­ing and got to work. Usu­al­ly I get to go in on the week­end or in the evening, but going in for a reg­u­lar work­day and sit­ting at the draw­ing table, it felt down­right legit­i­mate. So inter­est­ing­ly enough, the Life’s Work Cen­ter helped me in my pur­suit, although not in the way they usu­al­ly help.

The car­toon is sup­posed to con­vey the feel­ing (most peo­ple will find this strange) of awak­en­ing with the excite­ment of get­ting to go to work. That day I real­ly got to feel that eager­ness to meet the day, and believe it or not, that was Mon­day! I found myself think­ing of the NoFX song of the same title, although that song’s theme is a bit dif­fer­ent (a punk rock band works play­ing gigs dur­ing the week­ends, and so gets to spend the week going to movies and restau­rants when the crowds are gone) there is some­thing in com­mon with both ideas of free­dom com­ing from the cho­sen cre­ative career.

In the end, I’m pret­ty proud of the piece. I real­ly enjoyed using the Kure­take brush to get the expres­sive line vari­a­tion I want­ed (more about the Kure­take brush in a future post). While parts of the draw­ing do feel a bit rushed, I’m real­ly pleased with how it came togeth­er. And I’m quite hap­py to report that my client loves it and has got­ten com­pli­ments from the peo­ple he’s shown it to.