Pictured here is legendary Canadian Goose Surfer, Vanda Vonk, competing in the Ontario 500, in which she successfully defended her title.
Vonk has caused much controversy in the tight-knit North American surfing community by not using Canadian Geese, instead preferring to Luxembourg Black-Tipped Geese, which are both more agile and louder in honk.
Geese Surfing has never really caught as a mainstream sport, mainly due to the logistics of covering what is a very long distance event, and also due to the face that competition geese have never been media friendly and tend to bite their interviewer.
Today I’m going to talk through the process of creating this cartoon.
Pictured above is the finished cartoon. I’m now going to break down how I came up with the idea and the step-by-step process of drawing it.
I draw all my current cartoons on an iPad Pro using Procreate.
At the end of this article, there’s also a couple of cartooning tips.
But before I get started with the drawing, how did the idea come about in first place?
It all started with an Odd Dog...
...introducing the Siberian Greyhound...
I have a lot of fun coming up with new dog breeds, such as the red-spotted Dalmatian, and the Extended Dachshund. Amongst this collection of canine curiosities is the Siberian Greyhound pictured above, which I came up with a couple of years ago.
I liked the pose of the above cartoon, and thought I’d use it as the basis for a new cartoon.
During last rainy season in Japan, I was playing around with some Ideas about how to cope with rainy weather, and how you could get about more easily.
Enter Otter Boarding…
One idea I came up with was Shelley being towed along by a pair of otters.
Following on a year later, I thought it would be fun to invent some new extreme sports. Kite surfing popped into my head and that got me thinking what I could substitute for a kite.....and Geese Surfing was born.
Why geese?
Well, they fly in formation, and I thought that the honking might come in handy for comic potential.
So let’s get started with the drawing.
Initial rough sketch
Here’s the initial rough sketch. I went for three geese as it was enough to convey the idea, and I thought that any more would clutter the picture. This one was sketched out on my iPad Pro using the 6B pencil. I’ll sometimes doodle an outline in a notebook while travelling on the train and then take a photo of it later.
I thought I would change the angle of the cartoon from the otter boarding for the new version. I thought it would look a bit more dynamic than the side-on version.
Inking the characters
I’ve now inked in the main characters. They’re not yet positioned exactly how I want them, but that’s easy enough to fix, as it’s a doddle to move characters around.
As you can see, I’ve now added the board the harness. This was draw on four different layers, consisting of
woman
geese
board
harness
After checking that they look okay, I’ll make a copy of the individual layers to keep, and then merge the layers down into one. I like to keep separate layers of characters and objects for future reference, and also to create new cartoons.
The character layer now sits on top of the background outline. The layers are transparencies, so that’s why you can see the background through the characters.
I duplicated the character layer and then filed in the characters with white, so to stand out from the background.
Colouring the characters
Due to the somewhat eccentric nature of the “sport”, I decided not to have the woman dressed in any sort of traditional sports wear. Due to the fact that it is water sport, I thought I’d have her in a mackintosh and boots.
Colouring the background
I coloured in the background using mainly digital watercolour washes. For the water, I used the turpentine brush as I like the effect it produces.
Adding the sky
I again used digital watercolour to wash in the sky.
I forget to colour the board! It’s funny how you can sometimes overlook something, even though it’s sitting right under your nose.
Adding the water splashes
I used the turpentine brush to add some water splashes.
Changing the board
A friend suggested that it would be a good idea to alter the angle of the board to give a better impression of it being towed.
I also added a big and number on the surfer.
And that’s the cartoon finished, and Vanda Vonk is all set to compete in the next Geese Surfing event.
But just when I thought I was done with the cartoon…
Alternate prehistoric version
The same friend suggested that it would be cool to have a pterodactyl towing the board, so I couldn’t resist swapping the geese for one, and also the woman for a caveman. Perhaps the sport of Geese Surfing has some very old roots indeed.
Quick Cartooning Tip
When you draw geese make sure that they don’t merely look like big ducks…
That’s basically how I drew geese for ages, until I realised that I’d been honking up the wrong tree.
Quick Cartoon Idea Tip
Either after you’ve completed a cartoon, or when you take a moment to look back over some of your previous drawings, thing about if any of them could form the basis of a new cartoon.
You could also think what might happen if you were to substitute one character for another. That basically happened a few times in the above examples. It started off with a dog, then it was swapped out for a pair of otters, then a gaggle of geese, and then finally a pterodactyl.
What’s next
I put out a Cartoon Newsletter with an assortment of daft characters and silly stories, as well as some occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail to the orange box below and I’ll wing a copy your way.
