A tale of two classrooms.
So there I was stood in front of a classroom full of Elementary school students just outside of Osaka in Japan.
The theme of the week was animals. I’d just started the lesson and was drawing some animals on the board to see what words they already knew.
I drew a dog.
“What’s this?”
“Dog”
I drew a cat.
“What’s this?”
“Dog”
“It’s a cat”
“No, it’s a dog.”
I wasn’t going to win this one, twenty eight-year olds were united as one as to what a cat should look like - and what I’d just drawn didn’t fit their image.
This just goes to show that we don’t always have the same idea about what a person, creature, or object should look like.
To help you avoid the above situation, here are three points we are going to look at:
What you think something looks like is not the same as what others may think
Show friends
Identify the key features
What you think something looks like is not the same as what others may think.
People have a fixed idea of what an animal, person or object should look like, and unless you meet their expectation, then they’re not going to accept your image, or at the very least you’ll have to do a lot more explaining, which defeats having an image to help get an idea across in the first place.
Although I did change my idea of what a cat should or shouldn’t look like, I didn’t learn my lesson straight away as I went onto repeat the same mistake when drawing ducks and geese.
Here Is one of the pics I drew of geese last year.
My geese were basically large ducks. They had the same bills, even though ducks have bills whereas geese have beaks.
This leads onto the next point:
What are the key features?
Around fifteen later, I was now teaching high school. The students were being set a reader’s theatre project, where they had to perform a fairy tale. In preparation we were looking at various fairy tales, including The Goose that laid the golden eggs
Ducks, which primarily filter-feed little bugs and seeds from the water, have relatively long, wide-tipped bills for bringing in water. Geese, which evolved to prefer the leaves and roots of plants over filter feeding, have shorter, narrower beaks that give the birds a more forceful bite.
And that’s why no one wants to be pecked by a goose…
The easiest way to get the key features right is to…
Use reference photos
A quick look at a photo of whatever it is you are trying to draw could save you a lot of pain tryin to figure out how to draw it, and a lot of confusion on behalf of your audience.
And talking of your audience, one way to gauge whether you’ve nailed your subject matter, you could simply…
Show friends
Showing friends can help. If you don’t want to show your pictures online, you can just show the picture to a friend. Face-to-face is better anyway, as you can get immediate feedback.
What’s next
I put out a Cartoon Newsletter containing a whole host of characters and some occasional cartooning tips. Add your name and mail to the orange box below, and I’ll wing a copy your way.
