Chewing Pencils

This arrived in my inbox from Pete Ridley:

I do some drawing in my spare time. I’m not too fussed that it goes anywhere even if it’s just up on the wall. My question though is if such was to happen in the future I feel that I should aspire to getting the skills that that would take.

I feel if I can practice my skills toward a goal that it would be better . That goal at the moment could be to be included in a newspaper.

Some good questions here - I’ll answer them as best as I can!

1. Yes. You will have to redraw most of your stuff if it is ever to be printed in a newspaper. Not because it is bad necessarily, but because your style develops with time. The things you draw and the way you draw them now will be quite different to five or ten years from now. If you become ridiculously famous and rich as a cartoonist (think Charles Schultz) then these early sketches will become worth something one day. That will probably be after you’re dead, so don’t sweat about them too much!

2. Size will depend on whether you are drawing single panels or strips, but the best way to get an idea of size is to simply get the dimensions required by the syndicate companies. For instance, King Features says the following about size:

Most comic strip cartoonists draw their daily comic strips 13″ wide by 4″ tall. Most single-panel cartoonists draw their daily panel 7″ wide by 7″ high, not counting the extra space for the caption placed underneath the drawing. You can draw larger or smaller than that, as long as your cartoons are in proportion to those sizes.

Proportion is the key thing here. Your work doesn’t have to be the same size, but the same proportion.

3. There is no prescribed pen and paper to use. This is all part of your own style. But be sure to experiment with different types of pen, pencil, paper etc to come up with a combination that suits you. See this post for more comments about style. There are no ’standards’ to line work, but it has to be dark enough to reproduce properly.

4. Just a comment on aiming for publication in the papers. King Features says they receive 5000 submissions are year from cartoonists, of which they choose only three. While the papers are the most obvious market for cartoons, it is the hardest to crack. I don’t even bother trying to get into the papers as there are other markets that are screaming for cartoons but have far less competition. See this post about niche markets for more information on that topic.

So Pete, keep doodling, but be as creative and intentional as you can about getting your stuff published. Keep the papers as a goal, but don;t make them your only goal. The reality is most of us will never make any money there, but there’s plenty of other opportunities if you make the effort to look for them.

Hope this helps.