#oneaday Day 768: Sketchin'

I've been meaning to get back to doing stupid little doodles on posts for ages, but have just never… well, to be honest, I just haven't really been bothered to. Best to be honest about these things, and it's been nice seeing the stock images that kind and talented people from around the world have made freely available on Pexels, which you can access right from WordPress. But today, I thought I might as well actually use the fancy S-Pen that is stuck in the bottom of my phone, and so I did a tiny bit of research, found an actually pretty good-seeming free drawing app for Android (no more leeching off ClipStudio Paint's free trial) and just doodled a very quick thing for today.

Yeah, I know. Hardly worth making a big song and dance about, is it. But I tried to analyse why I fell off doing doodles on this site in the first place, and it was because I think I was trying to do a bit too much too soon. I thought that if I got a fancy graphics tablet and started faffing around with a fancy piece of software, then some sort of latent artistic ability would suddenly emerge and I would be able to produce something truly amazing, immediately.

Of course, it doesn't work like that. Not only does producing things that are genuinely amazing take time and effort, everyone also has their own distinct ways of working that they find most comfortable. For me, that has always been stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces. And so, I think for the immediate future at least, the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces are back for now.

The thing I've always liked about doing the stupid little stickmen with oddly expressive faces in the past is that they make me think a little bit about what I've just written. I wouldn't go so far as to say sketching a companion doodle for a post makes me really reflect on things in any great depth, but it does at least make me think about how — and if — it would be possible to get the general vibe of the post across using a quick and dirty doodle.

Often that takes the form of a stupid joke. Back when I did three-panel comics on this blog — which I know at least one person enjoyed, but no-one else ever mentioned, so I stopped doing them just in case I was actually embarrassing myself with them — there were even some running storylines that went along with the blog posts, and sometimes the blog posts and the comic storylines would feed off one another in various ways. That was always pretty fun, actually, but like I say, outside of one once-regular commenter who I haven't seen for a long time (I hope you're well, Jud!) and my wife Andie, who bought me a large canvas print of one of my comics that still hangs above our bed, no-one ever really mentioned them, and I had no great designs of being "a webcomic" or anything anyway; it just seemed like a fun thing to do, and I had a copy of Comic Life on my Mac, so things just sort of went from there.

When you have your own site, though, I think it's important to make your own little mark on it somehow. I mean, obviously you already do that if you're writing things on it, but we are creatures that respond well to obvious visual stimuli, so if the overall look of the site helps get someone's personality across, so much the better, I say. I have tried to do this to a certain degree with the use of the Atari ST's system font for headlines — I tried putting the whole site in it once, but several commenters said it was difficult to read, and it probably was — but nothing beats a bit of scrappy artwork from someone who doesn't really do visual arts.

I've told the story of why I like drawing expressive stickmen many times before on this blog, but for the benefit of those disinclined to go searching through the archives, it stems from, as so many things do, my time at school.

I did pretty well for myself at secondary school. What eventually turned out to be an autistic spectrum condition (though I wouldn't know that until several decades later) meant that I kind of thrived in the structured environment where I was always learning things. But I wasn't, like, the school swot or anything. I had a mischievous streak, which was brought out of me by my friends — and particularly my good friend Edd, who I sat with in many different lessons.

Edd and I liked to doodle. We would doodle all sorts of things, all the time. It was one of our favourite activities — though we knew not to do it anywhere that we might get in vaguely "serious" trouble for. No drawing on desks, no defacing school property, and no doodling on our exercise books that the teacher would mark. (I must confess, however, that during one especially memorable Year 7 Humanities class, my other friend Daniel Blyth and I went through an entire History textbook and drew at least one dick on every single page. My favourite was the one that was poking out of a Roman water gourd, inexplicably shouting "I SCREAM!")

No, Edd and I would doodle on paper that we would specifically bring in for that purpose, or our "Rough Books", which I know I have talked about multiple times on this very site, so I won't tell that specific story again. But anyway. Given the opportunity to doodle, we would take it. And one of the things that we loved doodling was stickmen doing stupid things.

One of the earliest things we did with stickmen began in German lessons, which were so boring we eventually came to the conclusion that was some sort of temporal disruption around the Modern Languages department. (I successfully freaked several of my friends out by using the "countdown timer" feature on my snazzy Casio digital watch to make it look as if time was indeed running backwards.) We livened things up with "The German Stickmen", which was a four-panel comic in which two people would argue about something really stupid in German in the first frame, the second frame would devolve into them yelling "Nein!" "Ja!" at one another multiple times, the third frame would always be one of them shouting "ACHTUNG!" (like in Wolfenstein 3-D, see) and drawing some form of (usually explosive) weapon, and the final frame would inevitably involve some form of extreme violence or, most commonly, a mushroom cloud.

Over time, our ambitions for the stickmen became more elaborate. We'd already "created" (and I use the term loosely) the characters Edlock Holmes and Watson as a result of our shared enjoyment over the point-and-click adventure games The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and when we went on holiday to Gran Canaria together, we produced an epic-length stickman comic, drawn in extreme haste and with no real care, called Fate of Thingy. This thing took on a life of its own and was rewritten multiple times, and I still have it somewhere — though I think it's missing one or two pages. The intent, you see, was to do a "rough" version of the comic using stickmen, then when we got home we'd do a "proper" one. I did, indeed, start doing a "proper" version, at one point, but we both decided we liked the stickmen so much they would become the canonical versions of Edlock Holmes and Watson. As Fate of Thingy continued to expand across multiple parts, all further development was in stickman form — and continued to be on the bright yellow legal pad Edd had acquired from his mother's workplace, until we ran out of that and had to start using bog-standard notebook paper.

So yeah. Stickmen are important to me, as ridiculous as that might sound. I have an intense, nostalgic and emotional attachment to them. And thus I think they should continue to be an important part of this blog. I will, therefore, from hereon, endeavour to provide you with a stupid little doodle to accompany each post (except when I really can't be bothered). Is that enough of a commitment for you? Well, tough shit, because it's all you're getting.

Nein!
Ja!
Nein!
Ja!
ACHTUNG!

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