Categories
Humour

Loosening Up

All right, not usually as loose as this

I must apologise form the infrequency of posts in the last while. That whole girlfriend business didn’t exactly help of course, and I’ve a cartoon commission on that has proven to be much more tricky than expected.

My work usually concerns ideas and words – so much so that at their worst, my cartoons are just two people talking. My drawing, if it can even be called such, is normally minimalistic, loose, and spontaneous. This job is quite the opposite. While still cartoony in style, it’s to illustrate the precise way that certain tools are used (I’ll tell more when the clients have actually published), so suddenly I have to pay enormous attention to tiny details. The tools have to be drawn correctly, they have to be held correctly. Hands! Endless hands. No one likes drawing hands… My own are physically tired now.

And we’ve had predictable communications problems. The clients of course know precisely how the tools are employed. So when they describe what they want, they know what they mean. I merrily walk off with a profound misapprehension of their wishes, and consequently have to discard hours and hours’ worth of entirely useless work. Perhaps I’ll do an exhibition of those later in the year. Under the title “Unnecessary Pictures”, because that will make them sound like art.

But this will be finished shortly – I hope – and I will try to make up for my absence.

Categories
Humour

The Brain – Your Body’s Attic Space

Modified version of an image originally upload...
That's Where I Left My Keys

So I’m working through the wreckage of my past, found dumped in a dozen broken cardboard boxes. This is a fascinating process for me because basically I have no memory. I’m not an amnesia victim, I’ve never had a traumatic brain injury. Well you know, as far as I can say. I just don’t remember things much. This leads to strange revelations, like coming across a comic strip that I have no recollection of seeing before, but which was quite clearly written and drawn by me. The old made new. What’s especially great is if one of these actually makes me laugh.

It’s all right to laugh at your own jokes when you don’t remember being the person who made them.

God my drawing used to be awful though. Stupid I know, but it gets me down. I know I am not by any means a good artist now; my drawing is merely adequate to the task, but I don’t mind that. And it’s not the fact that I wasn’t any good as a child. Why would I be? What’s depressing is that I thought I was.

Seems I really was a fairly bright kid though. I came across a Mensa entrance test that I’d taken but never submitted. Yeah, I considered applying to Mensa once. But then I figured, it’s a club that admits the smartest two percent of the population. Why slum it?

Also there was the small matter of a fee. I looked through it again. Some questions seemed pretty damn difficult even to adult me. In fact I’m not sure if I’d do any better now than I would’ve at fourteen.

Which is also depressing.

I thought I would reproduce one of the questions here. I think I know what the answer is meant to be, but I’m not completely sure there isn’t more than one solution:

In my aquarium I have all together in the same tank (1) garpa fish, which will eat both tennel fish and eels, (2) tennel fish, which eat eels, and (3) eels, which will feed on the dead bodies of garpa fish. The tennel fish can swim much too fast to be caught by the garpa fish, even in a tank. If no other food is given, which will be the last kind (or kinds) of fish left alive in the tank?

  1. Eels.
  2. Garpa fish and tennel fish.
  3. Tennel fish.
  4. Garpa fish.
  5. Tennel fish and eels.

Answer that, and you might be Mensa material. Though do bear in mind that the word means ‘table’.

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