Originally published in LLL US Western Division’s Connections #84, July/August 1999
As many of you may know, in addition to editing this publication I also produce the “Slice of LLLife” cartoons for LEAVEN and create other pieces of artwork for LLL. You might imagine that I have a large private studio at home with skylights and a locking door, a professional drafting table, art store delivery service, and baskets of magnificent ferns hanging from hand-forged hooks. Wouldn’t that be nice!
The reality is that my cartoons usually start out as very rough sketches on lined tablets balanced on my knee while I sit in the waiting room at my son’s guitar lessons. Many of the other small “spot” illustrations you see in Connections begin on index cards I keep along with a mechanical pencil in a plastic bag in my purse. I often work on them against my van’s steering wheel as I sit and wait during soccer practice or chess club.
My final inked drawings are done at night (while my sons have their turns on our computer) with the help of a small light table on my dinner table. During the day I often just hold up sketches to be traced against the sliding glass door.
The spot illustrations get inked when the dinner table is cleared. I later erase the pencil marks and clean up the lines with ink and white paint. I might then assemble some of the cropped sketches na sheet of paper and take them to the copy shop where I’ll make some reductions to give me—and other LLL “clients”—some size choices.
Like most of you, I don’t have a private office or permanent working quarters. I share space and time with my sons’ activities and computer projects, getting much of the work done during family life’s in-between times. I don’t really want, or seem to need, a big studio with ferns to do the real art of penciling and inking, producing connections that go beyond words.
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