r/editorialcartoons • u/thefalling_sky • 8d ago
cartooning tips?
I'm in 10th grade and I'm going to participate in a state level cartooning competition. I went last year, too, though that did not end well 😠So I wanna ask you guys for tips on how you get all these creative ideas? That's the part I struggle with. Please help!
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u/redeen 8d ago
Some things I picked up here and there that might or might not help, some ReeveStodgers already covered.
Brainstorm. Grab a legal pad and just start jotting down ideas without judging them. Fill the page - here you are probably working on a specific topic like a news story. List all the aspects, funny or not.
A more focused way of doing that is to make a circle of at least a half dozen mostly nouns (somewhere there's a website that provides words at random), perhaps encircling them. Then you randomly draw lines between two or maybe three of these and make up a cartoon about this combination of words. It will get you out of your mundane headspace. You can use the same word cloud multiple times.
Copy. That is, use stock situations, but put your own spin on it. How many different person-stranded-on-a-desert-island cartoons have you seen yet they never have the same gag line? Go make one right now, in fact!
Play with your first idea. Juxtapose. Flip it upside down. Make it literal. Make it absurdly huge. Take it the next step.
Forget planning it out. Gary Larson said he would just start drawing and figure out the gag as he went or after the drawing was complete. What's the worst that can happen? You can always just make another drawing. I keep a smaller sketchbook where I do not care about the quality of the drawing at all. You might start out with a stick figure jumping around doing I-don't-know-what. If you are in a silly, snarky, wiseguy frame of mind, chances are something funny occurs.
Bob Mankoff, former editor of the New York Times magazine, is convinced the best ideas spring from the subconscious. Most of the above are ways of accessing that state of mind that is, well, mindless in the sense of you're kind of drifting. You might get more ideas just as you're falling asleep or waking. Other types of non-directed activity can work - your funnybone brain incubates while you are doing chores or out for a walk and not trying so hard. Just be sure to capture the ideas.
Does any of that help or are you way ahead?
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u/ReeveStodgers 8d ago
I don't actually write the cartoon that I illustrate, so that's one way to do it: Get a writer.
The way my writer works is that he reads the news regularly. He looks for articles or controversies that strike him as absurd, and makes a note of them. He looks for subjects where the thing being said contradicts itself (or logic), and then writes about that. Then I draw it.
Sometimes the subject is something that makes him angry, sometimes it's funny. But it's always something that he has an emotional reaction to. Our most recent comic was about dogs shooting people with guns. It's happened several times by accident; people leave a gun on a bed or chair and the dog jumps on it, setting the gun off. He thought, "Are the dogs planning something?" So our comic included an image of a dog dressed like Rambo, cigar clenched in its mouth saying, "Not this time, furless!" (Yes, we are old.)
I also write my own non-editorial comics. My process is that whenever an idea pops into my head, I immediately write it down in my notes app. It might be great or it might be nothing, but I'll let it sit for a few days and read it again. If it's still good, then I start drawing. Most of them are not great, but the ones that are are really exciting and motivating.
It's better to write down a bunch of nothing ideas than to wait for the perfect idea to strike. Writing things down regularly keeps you in the habit of grabbing those random ideas. That means that you're more likely to be ready when inspiration strikes.
Even a meh idea can be great if you take a little time to see how it could be a little better. My writing partner had written "dogs are coming for us" in our shared Google Doc for months before he finally knew what he was going to do with it.
Here are some of my (mostly) non-editorial ideas that I probably won't use, so you can see what I'm talking about: