Tracy Brady Cartoons

Many thanks to Jordanne Brady for contributing this timely article to the blog. Jordanne is a past student of Norland’s, one of South Florida’s premier art training programs for the young and gifted. That means she’s a formally trained artist y’all. And she’s giving us the goods:

“One may come across cartoons, comic strips, or animations and wonder “Could I create something like that?” Don’t dismiss the question immediately, if you doubt your drawing ability.

As you may know there are countless successful animations, comics and cartoons whose cast ranges from the lowly stick person to indecipherable blobs and even magazine/newspaper clips. With that in mind all you truly need to make your own comics is a good sense of humour and to hone your writing skills. Unfortunately, it does get more technical if you plan on going main stream with your artwork.

Two things to keep in mind are, one, know your reader/viewers and, two, make your stories plausible.

To keep your viewers/ readers in mind, one, when creating a cartoon about tough manly plumbers, should not expect to see an eight year old girl interested in their work (though it’s not impossible). Furthermore, a comic about tough manly plumbers would not feature a fluffy pink bunny (unless the little rabbit is part of the punch line). So from start to finish every aspect of your manly plumber comic should reach out to tough manly men and the people who love them.

Secondly, depending on the subject matter of your comic, it should be believable. A scene in the rainforest for example, would not feature a camel (although it might be quite funny if it did)

In these two simple ways, you will have created the outline upon which to build (er’ draw) your comic and need only to present (present very well) your accompanying artwork to your audience”.

Kudos to Jordanne. This is information we can use.