#108: A little birdy told me...
Hello lovers,
Sometimes. Sometimes all the pieces come together. Little pieces. Big pieces. All working in unison to make giant pieces. This hot mess of cartoons is not one of those pieces.
This week we have some enterprising birds and some homework done wrong.
Keeping up with my classes,
Chris
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Caption: “The others are holding out for stock options.”
What do birds really want?
Is it a morsel of bread? Is it seed? Is it a cracker? Or is it the chance to invest at the ground level in the latest, and best, startup going around?
I suspect the latter.
A little artist’s note: Do I like this cartoon because I like the idea of birds getting into the stock market? Or do I like it because it was really fun to draw tiny suits on birds? Maybe it’s a bit of both.
I’m not sure where the inspiration for this cartoon came from. In my day job, I work on a lot of books about the stock/share market, and this concept kind of seeps into the rest of my world, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a starting point. But, beyond this, I think I found myself asking the question: What would a pigeon be looking for if they didn’t want bread? The answer, it turns out, was stock options.
Visually, I knew this cartoon need three key things: a guy with a hoodie, because it’s a startup; a few ‘normal’ pigeons, to provide contrast; and a couple of well-dressed, 1980s stock market-like pigeons, who would be holding on for the founder.
Obviously.
Caption: “On the bright side, at least he’s doing his homework.”
How dedicated are you to your child’s education?
Are you, say, dedicated enough to help them? Maybe dedicated enough to lose a few weekends on a project? Maybe even dedicated enough to let them destroy the house if it meant they did their homework on their own.
Because markers come off walls, right?
A little artist’s note: I also don’t know where the idea for this came from. It was one of those ones that came from nowhere, and then was suddenly a thing in my world. What I do know was that I spent a largely disproportionate amount of time writing out all the equations on the wall. Do they make sense? I very much doubt it.
The more important thing was to use those equations, and the size of the kid, to build perspective. Because the goal here was to get the viewer to start at the door and use surrounding white/negative space to force the eye to get from the start to the end of the frame.
Maybe. Maybe it does.
Thanks for reading The Mid-Week Squiggle.
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