It all started with a rock pool in Taiwan. You know how when you follow YouTube suggestions and you end up watching something completely different five or six clicks later?
Well, that’s how I ended up viewing a Taiwanese women exploring a rock pool and discovering the sea creatures left behind by the tide.
Why are constraints a good idea?
Constraints force you to narrow your focus and think. Without constraints acting as blinkers, then it;s often all too easy to get distracted by the multiple possibilities open in fron of you - and the result is that you may end up not getting much done.
It’s similar to in supermarkets where if consumers have 101 different jams to choices from, they get overwhelmed by the choice in front of them and simply refuse to make one. Where’s if they only had a few flavours, then they;re more likely to make a decision and move on.
Let’s look at a couple of examples where cartoonists have decided to apply a constraint to their subject matter.
The Bus
The bus, drawn and written by Paul Kirchner, ran in Heavy Metal magainze from 1979 - 1985. The strips were always pretty surreal, and always, always featured a bus - and this didn’t merely consist of a bus lurking somewhere in the background. As you can see from the sample above, the strip got pretty surreal at times.
Greyhounds
Freelance cartoonist, Rich Skipworth, concentrates mainly on Greyhounds.
He has to come up with not just dog traits in general, but ones specific to Greyhounds.
When you think of Greyhounds you think of speed and their lithe shape. That’s good for a few cartoons, but after you’ve exhausted those what do you do?
Well, you get creative.
So how come rock pools?
Here’s one way of picturing it. Think 0f all the creatures in the sea, whether swimming in it or on the seabed. Now think of all the ships, boats, and people travelling on the water, even the water itself. There’s a lot of different elements.
Let’s narrow it down a bit and imagine a bay, perhaps with a beach as well, with people playing on it. There’s not as many elements as with the sea example, but still quite a few.
Now let’s restrict things even further to the mini-ecosystem that is a rock pool. Suddenly there are far fewer elements to play with.
You could narrow it down even further, say to the contents of a bucket, or a rubber boot.
Let’s dip back into the tidal pool and use this as a subject matter.
What are some possible objects that you could find in a rock pool?
Here are a few, I’m sure you can come up with some more, particularly if you think along more bizarre lines.
How about the pool dipper herself?
What props associated with her might produce some potential gags?
While playing around with ideas about rock pools, it reminded me of The Perishers cartoon strip, which used to appear in The Daily Mirror in Britain. The strip was about a bunch of kids and a dog. Every year they would go off and camp at the seaside, where Boot the dog would go and stick his head in a rock pool to see what the crabs where doing. Every year the strip would return to this theme.
So instead of a dog being mistaken for something else, I imagined one of the pool dipper’s rubber gloves getting a similar treatment.
How could this relate to your own cartoon?
Pick a topic that you cartoon about. For example, if your cartoons are about office life, then narrow it down to the cubicle, then to the desk.
What’s on the desk that you could make a gag from?
A calendar? A computer? Could you look at any of these in more depth?
Try doing a mindmap on any of these and see where it leads.
Let’s look at an example and look at Gerald the Goat, who is a character in a strip I draw.
This mind map starts off fairly broad, so let choose one of the topics that came up and go into it in more detail.
This narrowing focus helps to identify some topics that you might overlook.
Over To You:
So try setting up some constraints on your own cartoons and idea generation, and see where it leads.