This is an exercise adapted from Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, basically a master cartooning course in the form of a slim book. The chapters are divided into weeks, 15 in total, with exercises and assignments each week. The first is ‘Spontaneous Drawing’, which contains this gem:

Exercise 1.3

Pencil out a grid (or grids) in your sketchbook, enough to contain 100 small drawings. Now, spending no more than 5 seconds per drawing, let your stream of consciousness guide you, drawing whatever word comes to mind (do not stop to think about it). Examples: persons, places, objects, occupations, concepts, emotions, etc. You should, at the end, have a little system of pictograms. 

It’s both harder and easier than it sounds. Hard, if you tend to think about drawing as your hands driving a car, instead of receiving then transmitting ‘whatever word comes to mind’, as the exercise asks. Easy, because if you can let go, the images will come pouring out of your hand onto the page.

The effort is in the particular quality of attention that you need to hold yourself in to be able to do this. It has little to do with drawing skill, or ‘talent’ as we’re used to understanding it, i.e. making something look life-like.

When I did the exercise above, I was surprised at the images swimming in my head, all the little details of things I could remember, in the two hours that had passed since waking up, going out to breakfast and coming home to draw.

I want to practice this more, but I find it hard, because just before I sit down to do it, I feel as though I’m about to jump off a cliff. When I’m doing it however, it’s the easiest thing in the world, like breathing or being a note of music.

It’s just… that cliff!

~

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

Zedeck scolded me for taking limes from the tree without permission, but I felt not a hint of remorse. If there’s one thing fruit trees can teach you, it’s abundance. When the durian tree in our backyard was in season, there was too much fruit everyday. We went around on bicycle giving them to everyone we knew in town – it felt like depositing gold in the community. Seasonal gold.

The nangka tree next to the front gate constantly produces. I made an artwork about it. We believe that the endless surplus of nangka has nurtured at least two generations of musangs and countless squirrels by now. I often find their poop scattered around the driveway near the tree.

~

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

The Mary Oliver poem from the previous day’s drawing led to this one, specifically, the line ‘you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’.

If someone had asked me straight up, ‘what do you love?’, I probably would not have said ‘cute animals’. Drawing seems to call forth responses from different parts of the mind, or the self. Not only that, it makes us hear a question differently.

What would happen if a Q & A were conducted entirely via drawing? How bout a parliamentary session?

The other day I was talking with Zedeck about how the game Charades was an excuse for people who would otherwise never dream of drawing, to actually do it. We started to think about inventing other games that would sneakily compel people to draw.

This video compels me to draw. Sometimes I search it out on the internet, as if replaying a song I want to hear again. Bat and Hat by Becky James:

~

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.

While facing a difficult project, a notebook can be an imaginary friend – a way for the mind to talk to itself so it can find out where it needs to go. The way cannot be found by thinking, only by making.

I owe so many of these ideas and methods to Lynda Barry’s books What It Is and Picture This.

~

Antid Oto – italian for antidote – was one of Leon Trotsky‘s earliest pen names. I also love the Malay word for it: penawar. A few months ago, I started taking regular walks and making drawings afterwards as a way to deal with worry, procrastination, hopelessness, writer’s block, internet rage, and digital distraction. I’ll post a series of them here, one every other day, for as long as I keep making them.