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    Drawing Funny: A Guide to Making Your Terrible Little Cartoons Funnier
    Drawing Funny: A Guide to Making Your Terrible Little Cartoons Funnier
    Drawing Funny: A Guide to Making Your Terrible Little Cartoons Funnier
    Ebook186 pages38 minutes

    Drawing Funny: A Guide to Making Your Terrible Little Cartoons Funnier

    By Oslo Davis

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you can’t learn cartooning, and it can’t be taught.’

    And so begins Oslo Davis’ illustrated book on how to draw gag cartoons. Talk about shoot yourself in the foot! But he’s kidding, kind of. There are reasons why your terrible cartoons are not funny, and Oslo is very happy to point them out. He’s also prepared to give you some advice, for what it’s worth, using examples selected from more than twenty years’ drawing for newspapers and magazines worldwide.

    Drawing Funny is a how-to guide for people who might never draw a cartoon in their life but always read the cartoons first in the New Yorker and want to know how it’s done.

    Oslo Davis is a widely published illustrator, artist and cartoonist. Oslo draws regularly for the Age newspaper and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and online for SBS. He has also drawn for the Golden Plains music festival, the National Gallery of Victoria, Readings, Triple R FM and the Wheeler Centre, among many others. Oslo's books have covered topics ranging from Donald Trump, Henry Lawson, Asian mothers and scenes of angst-ridden daily life you can colour in.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateSep 30, 2016
    ISBN9781925435436
    Drawing Funny: A Guide to Making Your Terrible Little Cartoons Funnier
    Author

    Oslo Davis

    Oslo Davis is a widely published illustrator, artist and cartoonist. Oslo draws regularly for the Age newspaper and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian and online for SBS. He has also drawn for the Golden Plains music festival, the National Gallery of Victoria, Readings, Triple R FM and the Wheeler Centre, among many others. Oslo's books have covered topics ranging from Donald Trump, Henry Lawson, Asian mothers and scenes of angst-ridden daily life you can colour in.

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      Book preview

      Drawing Funny - Oslo Davis

      Many illustrations in this book first appeared in other publications, including the Age, Readings Monthly, Meanjin, Is Not Magazine, Going Down Swinging, Torpedo, This Annoying Life, This Annoying Domestic Life, the Big Issue, Art Guide Australia and Drawn From Life.

      To Dad, for the funny genes

      CONTENTS

      Introduction: Don’t Take My Word For It

      —Humble beginnings, harsh realities

      The Gag Reflex

      —How to draw it so they get it

      Tropes De Monde

      —Cartooning standards and fallbacks

      You Must Rememoir This

      —Drawing on real-life experiences

      Horse, Whispering

      —Talking animals in cartoons

      Away With Words

      —How captions carry a joke

      The Silent Treatment

      —The power and simplicity of wordless cartoons

      Surely You Can Be Serious?

      —Political cartoons, controversies and taboos

      Schtick At It

      —If all else fails, tickle your own fancy

      Sources

      Index

      —The index

      INTRODUCTION

      DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT

      —Humble beginnings, harsh realities

      ‘Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog.

      Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.’

      E. B. White

      I TOOK UP DRAWING in my early twenties to escape the drudgery of teaching English to miserable high school kids in miserable towns on the west coast of Tasmania. After work I would lie forlornly on the couch and draw the curtains (pun!), dreaming of chucking it all in and getting the hell out of that place. Later, after I’d chucked it all in and got the hell out of that place, I’d sit forlornly in cafés in India, Vietnam and Japan and scribble in sketchbooks, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. So beganeth my illustrious career in drawing!

      I drew everything I saw – empty coffee cups, decrepit French colonial villas, dead rats on the road, surly waitresses – not realising I was giving myself the art education I didn’t have the guts to do the first time round. I started to like drawing, and I got better at it. A friend published a book of my efforts, a collection of Vietnamese street scenes, which inspired my future wife to introduce herself to me. (Years later a cartooning friend of mine said, ‘You married your groupie!’)

      After a while I got bored of drawing street scenes, so I shifted my energies to drawing jokes. I discovered that making someone giggle with a badly drawn joke was infinitely more satisfying than getting a pat on the back for a fine drawing of a vase of flowers. People preferred my jokes, and I preferred making them laugh.

      Fast-forward seventeen years and I’m now telling you how to draw funny. I’m an authority! Ha! On how you can be a cartoonist! Go figure!

      Um, no, I’m not actually an authority on anything. The truth is you can’t learn cartooning and I can’t teach it. If this book says anything, it’s that everyone finds their own way to cartooning and makes it up

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