Day 83 : comic art

and cartoons. Where would we be without laughter? In the late 1970s, Matt Groening, created Life in Hell as a comic strip which was published in 250 weekly papers. He eventually created two animated series for television – The Simpsons and Futurama. Matt is left-handed as is many of his characters on The Simpsons.

The medium for today’s art is a scratch board. Black ink is applied to a hard surface and is scratched away to reveal the paper. We had to think about what we wanted to leave black and where we wanted the color. There is no such thing as erasing in scratch board.

Sandy: This made my brain hurt. Since I wanted a black outline, I had to think opposite of what I would do to draw a line. I had to take away black around the black I wanted to leave as a line. Once I scratched off the black ink, it was gone. I couldn’t add it back, which is why Marge has eye lashes on only one eye. The finished art would be only two colors so I had to plan beforehand where those colors would be. The implement I used for scratching kept accumulating bits of ink on the tip and caused blips as I drew (undrew?). Just as I thought I was making a perfect line, the tip would get hung up on some ink. Good to have low expectations.

Kelly: Mine was easy because I “cheated” as Snoopy is always just black and white. I know I could have made it harder and scratched away all the white (leaving the pink as the “white”) but that would have taken hours… which I just didn’t have on a gorgeous bay area Sunday. I’ve never been to the Charles Shultz Museum in Santa Rosa but after checking out the site I definitely want to make the trek.

Sandy’s year long journey – going from being a right-hander to left-hander, and Kelly’s parallel trip as a left-hander doing things as a right-hander.