Off the shelf: Me

In my last year at college, having made the decision to be a cartoonist rather than a graphic designer, I produced a book of cartoons called ‘One Man and his Dogs.’ It was a part biography, part fantasy on the life and experiments of Ivan Pavlov, whose work with dogs led him to the discovery of Conditioned Reflexes, and a Nobel Prize. The whole thing is really one long riff on dogs, bells and food. I thought this week I’d post a few spreads from it, starting with this wraparound cover, based on the pied piper or the dance of death – take your pick. (You'll have to click on it to see it bigger).
In spite of spending lots of time feverishly sketching people in museums and galleries, my drawing skills were minimal. I was using a black Schwan Stabilo crayon, which forced me to draw large, against my usual habits, and then reducing the drawings to the required size on a photocopier (a technique that turned out to be a huge mistake as the printing was a disaster). Although the drawings are pretty ropey, there’s a looseness and ‘openness’ to them that I’ve since lost, and in some ways bad drawing is funnier than good. Oddly I seem to have lost the original drawings too, somewhere down the line. I may have thrown them away.