Cricketing Critters

Creating Cricketing Critters

That’s a very wintry wicket and a totally unseasonal way to kick off what has become an occasional series of cricketing critters.

Hang in there if you’re a non-cricket fan, as I’m focusing on how I created this and subsequent cartoons, rather than musing on the delights of test match or the shorter formats of the game.

I was looking for something to draw off the cuff for fun, something a bit looser than my usual cartoons. I wanted to explore a new subject matter, and also to experiment with producing cartooning quickly without much revision.

I think that a T20 series between India and England was being played at the time, so the phrase ‘don’t hang around at the crease’, meaning to hit out and not play too defensively, had stuck in my mind. I’d also been reading about Shackleton and Antarctic exploration, so that was lurking in the background as well. 

One simple yet very effective device for generating ideas for cartoons is to combine two different elements together. One acts as a base element which remains the same, and the other is a different topic that you change each time. In this case the base element is ‘cricket’, and the topic was ‘the Arctic’.

I drew the cartoon in the same style as the dog batting, not hanging around too long, trying to do as much of the cartoon as possible in one take.

It was a fun one to draw, and upon completion it struck me that I could have a never-ending stream of ideas simply by combining cricket with a different animal each time.

The Animal Kingdom Takes To Cricket!

Sledging is a term where the fielders make comments to the batsmen to try and put them off their game, things along the lines of ‘my grandmother could have hit that’, or ‘try using the other end’. Of course that’s the sort of stuff that’s fit for print, I’ll leave some of the more regular witticisms on the field of play. 

So thinking along the lines of a couple of different species that would be antagonistic towards each other, at least commonly in cartoon terms, I came up with the cat and dogs.

Whereas the first cartoon was done entirely in digital pen, for subsequent ones I decided to use the 6b pencil in Procreate. For colour I went with watercolour as I wanted a softer feel to it, and also thought it would go better with the pencil. This is the first one I tried in the new style.

Outline

This was drawn with a 6b pencil on Procreate. I tidied up some of the lines, but not too much. Instead of doing any outlining in pen, I then tripled the layer to create a bolder outline.

Monochrome Version

I thought I’d try both a monotone and a colour version. For this one I set the wash tool at 20% opacity and the built up the layers.

Colour Version

I again set the wash brush at 20% to build up the colour gradually. There was a little bit of overspill of colour, however, I wasn’t fussy about cleaning all of it up as I wanted to retain a loose feel to the cartoon.

I really enjoyed creating the cartoon, and as I’m a huge cricket fan, and like drawing a lot of different animals, I look forward to seeing what other cricketing critters I can come up with.