#oneaday Day 927: On Stickmen

I draw stickman primarily for one reason: I’m not very good at drawing anything more complicated. I’ve never practiced drawing particularly hard — I’ve always enjoyed doodling and drawing stupid things, but I’ve never tried particularly hard to actually practice good technique or anything. I spent a few weeks reading up on how to draw manga-style characters a few years back, but never really got the hang of drawing things that look particularly “convincing”. My manga-style drawings always end up looking like the sort of thing a 12-year old kid scrawls in their art book in an attempt to look cool, rather than anything particularly convincing. So no, you won’t be seeing any of those here for the moment.

And then I inevitably run into various other issues if I do decide to draw more detailed characters, which I shall now demonstrate for you forthwith. Note: I am not doing this to solicit feedback, nor am I fishing for compliments (not that these pics deserve any) — simply to demonstrate a point.

Let us begin.

The first question I inevitably end up asking myself regards body image. I put “myself” in my cartoons frequently, and drawing a body makes me ponder whether or not I should draw an “idealised” version of myself (right, obviously) or a more… ummm… “accurate” depiction.

This also raises difficult questions when a friend of mine asks for a guest appearance, as I then have to make the same decision regarding how I represent them — I don’t want to cause offence, but at the same time I want them to be recognisable, and their “shape” is often a part of that factor. It’s just easier to do a stick body because everyone is equal, then, and the main distinguishing factor between characters is not something people (including me) can be particularly sensitive about, but instead the part that really matters to their “character” — their face.

Also, I’m not very good at drawing fat people. Or boobs.

Another thing I am not very good at is posing characters, as the slightly uncomfortable-looking Alex above will attest. I am fond of “arms folded” and “hands on hips” as strong poses, but these are tricky to draw. In the case of “arms folded”, I have no idea where the fuck to put people’s hands, and I’m not even entirely convinced I know where people’s arms go. I then run into mild perspective issues as I try to figure out what would be behind those arms, and it all just gets to be a bit of a mess. (I should probably do it the other way around — body first, then overlay arms on top.)

Questions of clothing then rear their head. What should characters wear? Should they wear the same thing all the time as part of their “look”, or should they switch things up occasionally? Will I ever learn how to draw bare legs beneath a skirt?

Finally, I have to figure out what on Earth to do with more bizarre characters such as Phillipe here. Phillipe works as a stickman because stickmen can get away with exaggerated expressions such as his perpetual gurning. But does that really work when placed atop a more “normal” (i.e. not stick-figure) body?

Looking at the pics I’ve drawn above, it actually sort of does. (Also, I can take further advantage of Phillipe’s perverted nature with offensive T-shirt slogans.) But I still find myself looking at drawings like that and thinking to myself that they’re crap, whereas I’m much happier with the way these characters come out as stick figures. Stick figures can be easily posed, manipulated, mangled and otherwise abused. As soon as you add a “proper” body to the mix, you have to think about things a little more. They’re not as bendy. Well, that’s not true, you can do whatever you want with them. But contortions are easier to draw on a stick figure than on a character with a body. Also you don’t have to worry about lighting with stick figures, whereas cartoons with “proper” bodies inevitably look better if there’s a sense of light and shadow in there.

Why am I thinking about this now? Well, every so often I get a hankering to write a visual novel, but the one thing that usually stops me before I even start is thinking “I’ll never find anyone to draw some good-looking graphics, and I certainly can’t do it myself.” I’ve contemplated making a visual novel using just stick-figure characters and I think it might sort of work — it’d certainly be a distinctive aesthetic — but then I lose confidence and think it would be the rubbishest idea ever.

What I should actually do, of course, is actually script the thing for myself and then see if I can actually recruit someone who can Do Drawing afterwards. But then I go and get into a loop where I want to “see” the character as I’m writing their dialogue, and I go around and around and around and don’t do anything at all.

Screw graphics, basically. They just get in the way.

#oneaday, Day 212: Eat Poop, You Cat!

When you’re in a dinner party kind of situation and the conversation seems to be drifting towards some sort of standstill, there are several things you can do to rectify the situation. You can bring out the “big boys’ alcohol”—the whisky, the brandy, the port, the strong stuff that only ever seems to come out at dinner parties. You can invite everyone to retire to a different room where you can regale them with tales of how you acquired each and every record in your substantial Bavarian folk music collection. If you’re a Cockney, you can gather around the upright piano and have a knees-up. Or you can resort to some sort of game.

Dinner party games aren’t quite the same as “board game night” games. Whipping out a copy of Power Grid or Agricola is inadvisable unless everyone at the dinner table is an avid boardgamer already. No; something that is either quick and easy to play, or something that everyone knows is what is called for. On the “something that everyone knows” front, there are mainstays like Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly and all manner of things like that. The downside to these is that they take quite a long time to play. So that leaves the other alternative: something that is quick and easy.

You could play Hangman. But that’s a bit primary school, as is I Spy. You could play Murder in the Dark, but you can guarantee that someone has forgotten the rules because there is no one person in the world who can remember all the rules to Murder in the Dark. You could play Musical Chairs, but there’s always some killjoy bastard who doesn’t want to get up and dance. (Usually me.)

Or you could play Eat Poop, You Cat!

This is not as sinister as it sounds. In fact, it’s a very simple, quick and easy game to play. All you need are enough pieces of paper and drawing implements as you have participants. The more the merrier, generally, but the optimum number of people is somewhere around six to eight.

This game is very straightforward. There are no winners and losers. It’s purely for fun and entertainment. The way it works is as follows:

1. Everyone around the table writes a short sentence on their piece of paper. For brevity’s sake, you may wish to limit the maximum number of words. But generally someone will go over the limit anyway, so that’s a largely pointless endeavour in most cases.

2. Everyone passes their piece of paper to the person on their left (or right, if you prefer going that way. You big freak.) and the new owner of the paper has to draw a picture representing the sentence.

3. The person who has just drawn a picture folds over the original sentence and passes the paper around again, so the next person can only see the picture.

4. This next person has to write a sentence representing what they think the picture is showing.

5. They then fold over the picture, so the next person can only see the sentence.

6. The process repeats until each piece of paper has gone right around the table and back to its original owner, alternating picture-sentence-picture-sentence.

7. The papers are then unfolded.

8. Hilarity ensues.

Like Chinese Whispers, the game often ends up in a rather different place to where it began. It plays on people’s imaginations and creativity, and it’s pretty rare—and actually fairly undesirable—for people to manage to keep the meaning of the original sentence intact.

There’s a whole website dedicated to this game with some fantastic example playthroughs. I can highly recommend you play it the next time you start boring your dinner party guests. Rather than being remembered as that deathly dull host, you’ll be remembered as a Super Fun Person! Which is good. Unless you really don’t like hosting dinner parties, in which case you may actively wish to bore your guests so much that they never return.

#oneaday, Day 211: The Only Art Lesson You Will Ever Need

“I can’t draw!” I hear you cry, assuming you’re shouting about not being able to draw at this exact moment, which you probably aren’t. But no matter! Help is at hand. You don’t have to be an excellent artist to be able to draw things that are distinctive and interesting. I’m going to let you into the secrets of my own craft which you have doubtless seen throughout this blog. The art of the stickman.

I’ll tell you a secret: I can draw. Sort of. Not great, and I’ve never studied it or had any particularly formal training. But I can sort of draw. I just choose not to when it comes to the pictures on this blog, because ever since secondary school when my good buddy Ed “Roth Dog” Padgett and I discovered that stickmen are actually the most expressive things in the universe, we’ve often chosen to stick to stickmen, no pun intended. On a side note, Roth actually can draw, as you’ll see here.

But anyway. Let’s begin.

Step 1: Pose

When you’re drawing a stick person, the first thing you need to consider is what they’re going to be doing. Since the body is very simple and you’re going to spend most of the time on the face, this is a simple matter of making a quick decision. Most people stick to the traditional model (figure 1, but you can get stick figures doing all manner of weird and wonderful things (figure 2) even before you’ve put a face on them. Remember to add feet. Feet make poses more versatile. Adding feet to your stickmen is the difference between standing casually and tapping its foot impatiently.

Step 2a: Normal faces

The next step, which a lot of people leave out, stopping at step 1, is to add a face to your stickman. You only need three lines to put a face on a stickman. Two vertical lines for eyes, and one horizontal or curvy line for a mouth. These lines can be modified to produce a variety of expressions (figure 3).

Fig. 3: Possible stickman facial expressions.

Step 2b: Open-mouthed faces

If one of the closed-mouth expressions just isn’t expressing things expressively enough for you, then you may wish to consider opening your stickman’s mouth. What you put inside your stickman’s mouth can make a large amount of difference to what the expression means (figure 4).

Step 2c: Exaggerated faces

If none of the above faces are quite getting across what you are trying to say with your stickman, then simply throw any semblance of realism out of the window and do something ridiculous. These are stickmen, after all. They can do whatever the hell you damn well want (figure 5).

Step 3: Detail

Once you’ve come up with a pose and a face, all you need to do is add some individuality to the stickman by adding some detail. This is normally done via the medium of hair. Creating different stickman characters is a simple matter of giving them different hairstyles. No-one will ever notice that they have the same faces and poses. You can even change a stick person’s gender at the drop of a hat simply by changing the hairstyle (figure 6).

And with just those three steps, you are officially done! You have created your own unique character. Congratulations. You’re a cartoonist.