A Midsummer's Nightmare

Seeing that this site is called "Bill White Cartoons", I feel I may have been a bit remiss lately in not talking about cartoons and the "life-of-a-cartoonist", in general. I will correct that mistake in the next few posts.

Whenever I teach a cartooning class (Which I do from time to time.  If you're in SE Massachusetts in January of 2010, don't miss out!), I always tell my students to save every drawing they do. Even if they hate it. If you draw often enough, and think about what you are doing, you are bound to get better. Then you can sift through examples of your old work, and see how much you've improved.

Take the piece shown here, please. This was a poster done by me a long  time ago for a local theatre group's production of Bill Shakespeare's classic, "A Midsummer Night's Dream". I was in the cast, so I was asked to design the poster. At the time I did this drawing, I was pretty impressed with myself. Now, I look at it and can see nothing but the sheer awful-ness of the whole thing!

For starters: What  is up with the anatomy? Had I ever seen the actual proportions of a human being?  The clunky, stiff hands are particularly awful.

Hey, how about that weak ink line? Combined with all the superfluous detail, this makes for one big mess of an image. My mentor, Mat Brown, always mentions knowing when to "stop" drawing. I wish he had been around when I was drawing this.

I could go on and on about all the defects in this drawing (the lettering, etc.), but let's leave it alone, and chalk it up as part of the learning process. I should really re-draw this to show you how it should have been done, but I have looked at it too long now, and that would be painful.

I'd like to think that over the years, I have improved, and all you wanna-be cartoonists will too, if you just keep working at it.

BTW,  the poster  aside, the show was great, and I was awesome in it.

I hope that made up for the poster...