Doodleton from 3/22/19

I am not good at posting to the blog because I have an issue with spelling and sentence construction. To be honest about it, I hate it. 

I have never been good at grammar or spelling, all the way back to Mr. Cook’s 5th grade class when the class picked on me because I had so many outstanding late reading and writing assignments, Mr. Cook would write all of them down on a list for EVERYONE to see. I still remember one day Mr. Cook stood in front of our class, taking a special moment he pointed out the length of my list and how he “could stand on it and reach light bulbs to change them.” The rest of the class jeered and laughed at me, I sank deeper into my seat, …and cried later at home. Two things happened that day; 1)I grew to never fully trust another teacher and 2)I grew to hate anything about the written english language. Hated reading it, hated writing it, did everything I could to get away from it. 

Shame on you Cook, your lack understanding and motivation of children with different needs shut me off from WORLDS of great stories to other places. Landscapes of beautiful scenery and it’s inhabitants were barred to a young man by your callousness. In fact it turned that young soul in the opposite direction, where he vowed to never read again because all he could hear in his ears was your laughter in unison with an entire class of children against one. Congratulations, you status has now been changed from teacher to bully!

Thank God I later in life had enough curiosity and fortitude to look into fiction and non fiction works, on my own, where I found escape, love, humor, beauty, creativity, strength of character and purpose.

More importantly I found that I could create entire worlds ON MY OWN and I found friends in those worlds that cared about me and what I thought and gave no thought to what my recent test scores were, how fast I read, what cloths I wore or even what I looked like. I found a home at the tip of a pencil.

Fast forward to today where I have turned that love into something more.

​I publish my cartoons to the web site a week in advance, I used to do an entire month of them at a time but to do that kind of work turns out being like trudging through a marsh, you just pound one out right after the other with no appreciation of them and also, if something important happens during the week I still have enough time to change them as it is still fresh in the minds of my readers.Two weeks ago I was working on the cartoon for 3/22, which had a Wizard and a monk trying to carve a single figure in stone, a self portrait if you will.

Click on the image to blow it up.

​I use the visual gag stone carving a lot. To me it represents the creative process, invested time, skill, planning and it’s fun visually. Sometimes I have Shannon look at my work, she checks grammar, spelling and sometimes overall composition. Frankly, it is nice to get an extra set of eyes on something after working on a group for a length of time. After she looked at it she thought that I should change the single figure to a bunch of figures in different poses just for fun and she walked out of the room.

Ok, challenge accepted.

I began changing the drawing to what it is today, a series of characters planted randomly in a "tree trunk" formation. When I finished, I called her back in and she just looked at me. “You just did this?” she asked. “Yup.” I said. “No you JUST did this?” she asked again. I looked at her. “Sketch, I just stepped out of here TEN MINUTES ago and you did all that in minutes??”

I guess the old saying is true; time flies when your having fun with your friends.

Go be creative!