Probably the thing that I’m most excited about right now in my cartooning is a Daily Shouts piece I have coming out soon with The New Yorker. I can’t say much about it because it hasn’t come out yet, but I’m pretty sure it will probably come out on July 3. This will be my first Daily Shouts piece, so I’m very excited about it. Keep your eyes peeled!
Otherwise things have been pretty quiet for me with The New Yorker. I’m still drawing cartoons every day and submitting my batches, but The New Yorker has a hiatus on cartoon submissions for the next two weeks. It’s a bummer because that’s two weeks of no potential sales, but on the plus side, it will allow me to build up a backlog of cartoons to pull from in future batches.
As I mentioned in my last post, I'm working at the art summer camp for 7 to 13 year-olds this summer.
It’s been good so far, but this job sure takes a lot out of me. I don’t know why this gig is so much more draining than my usual high school art teacher gig during the regular school year. Is it because the kids are younger and more high energy? Is it because the weather is hotter?
One of my biggest hits with the kids has been this bulletin board outside of my classroom. Every week I cover it in a big, fresh, blank white sheet of paper, hang a few brush pens from it, then post a new drawing prompt. The kids go crazy for it. There’s pretty much a constant stream of kids huddled around the bulletin board drawing things on it.
It’s amazing how such a small act on my part, designating a space and permission and a suggestion to draw something, leads to so much creative activity. This is one of my favorite things about teaching, creating a situation and then stepping back and seeing how people run with it.
The camp has a large format printer so I took some of my favorite of the kids’ drawings and blew them up humongous on the printer, like 4 to 8 feet, and hung them up outside my classroom.
There’s something so amazing about taking a tiny little doodle and blowing it up gigantic. It’s epic.
I teach two classes. One is called Comical Comics where we focus on telling jokes in comics. The other is called Graphic Novelties where we focus on telling stories with comics. Just a week and a half left and then we’ll have a big showcase where we will show off zine collections of each of my students’ comics.
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