For those of you who don't know Lynda Barry, she is an American cartoonist and an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconson-Madison. She has also received a MacArthur Fellowship. Her work is stunningly imaginative. Her drawings complemented by her writing is the reason she has published numerous books...my favorite so far being 'What It Is'.
I'm only a third of the way through her 'Making Comics' book, and what I've accomplished so far--is filling a Michael Roger Decomposition Book of my work based on Barry's Daily Diary practice.
The first part of her course and that I did was to create a caricature-like image of me using the principles of Brunetti. The result is not as sophisticated as a caricature and not as simplistic as a stick figure. Rather, it is inbetween and has characteristics of how I think of myself (like having short hair, wearing glasses, my hands drawn as mittens, etc.).
The daily practice has two elements. One was doing a timed sketch responding to a prompt. The medium was a marking pen on a large index card. You were to choose a prompt from her list and draw yourself as if you were in, doing, or responding to that prompt e.g. for example, interacting with an octopus, running from a giant snowball. Whatever you drew was to be visual without words.
It's so interesting to see what you can do in a short time...the corners cut, the marks or lines included or left out that suggest an action or reaction, and how one can convey environment.
In this collage of eight efforts, can you match up the prompt with the image without looking at the prompt that may be visible in the collage?
*As a viking
*As a pirate
*Goddess of Spring
*As a puppet
*As a French person
*As a cave person with a pal
*Wearing a favorite wig or hairstyle
*Signing to someone deaf
Do you see the 'me' characteristics (as mentioned above) in this collage or even other ones?
If you're now interested in exploring Lynda's book, this is the one to look for:
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