#4: Couches, questions, and flotation devices
Hello to a new week
Sometimes, things happen in slow succession. They build up. They place themselves together, acting cool as if it was all intended that way. As if it was part of the plan. Other times, things all happen at once. In no logical order, in no logical space. And we just have to hold on tight and see where the next step is going to take us.
As you’ll see below, this week’s cartoons, are a combination of all of those things. Where the expected and unexpected collide and what is left is what you get. You’ve got a couch delivery and the appropriate aftermath, a trivia night that happened in the midst of it all, and then a nice easy play on words to finish it off.
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Let’s get cracking,
Chris
Caption: "The couch is made of the finest leather, and the armchair is made of the packaging the couch came in."
Between Christmas and New Year in 2022, my partner and I made a bold decision. We would let go of our old, worn, beat up couch, and splurge on something brand-new. In this process, we discovered two key things. First, that it is really really hard to find a genuinely comfortable couch. Second, couches take a long time to arrive, like a long time.
Fast-forward four months and many false starts, we get a message to say the new couch will be delivered soon, specifically on the day before Good Friday. It would arrive on our first week back after a holiday and at a time that was almost certain to be chaotic. So, the couch arrives, and it’s nice. I’m sitting on it now. But then, well then there’s the packaging. So. Much. Packaging. And it’s not just packaging, it’s sheets upon sheets of unrecylcable plastic, all different kinds, held together with unrecyclable tape and unrecyclable plastic of a different kind, oh and some thankfully recyclable cardboard.
With all this considered, what followed was an intense hour of slicing, dicing, and packing the smaller packaging into giant make-shift bags constructed from the bigger sheets of packaging. I didn’t need a walk that evening; I had more than worked up a sweat from it.
This cartoon is built on this idea and, in truth, I suspect we could have built much much more than an armchair with the leftover packaging.
The new couch is very comfortably, though.
A little artist’s note: I struggled a lot with trying to establish the right light source on this one, and in earlier drafts, there was a lamp in between the couch and the armchair to try and establish why the light would be hitting certain parts of the people and furniture. However, the more I looked at it, the more I realised that the composition meant that on an initial view, all you saw was the lamp and you had to strain to see the people, the proper subjects of the cartoon. Hench, which the room looks a little unfurnished. I’ve placed the two side by side below for your debate and amusement.
Caption: "Let's get ready to RUMBLE... with some questions about countries beginning with the letter I."
Every now and then, my friends and I line up at a pub to do a trivia night. And, if you haven’t been in a while, pub trivia today is not what your dad or grandad remembered. Gone are the days of some old timer standing out the front reading from a history book. Instead we have big screens, colourful backgrounds, and strange and interesting photoshop challenges. But, because the old days never really leave us, sometimes you just can’t make a question or topic sexy. Sometimes you get a question that is simply there to test your mettle, with very little option to be rich or flashy.
This cartoon, encompasses those mixed trivia feelings. While the screen can keep getting bigger, and the music can keep getting louder, the questions sometimes stick to their old familiar and boring selves. And that’s okay, totally okay, but it’s still quite entertaining.
A little artist’s note: I’ve been to a lot of pub trivia nights. Like, a lot of them. In this cartoon, I wanted to play with the contrast of the pub drinkers in casual clothes and the host dressed in a shirt and tie. The goal was to add to the aforementioned paradox of a boring question in a dynamic environment.
Caption: Buoyant/flamboyant
A fun one to finish on. This was mostly a silly conversation with my partner about how similar the words buoyant and flamboyant were, although in my mind, flamboyant had a ‘u’ in there somewhere. Long story short, what emerged was the very silly cartoon you see before you. It was drawn during an oddly productive flight home from a certain tropical location, and I like it simply because of it’s stupid simplicity.
A little artist’s note: This one almost drew itself. While the other two cartoons in this newsletter use a painted style, I kept this one simple, in part because I didn’t think the plane would be stable enough to weild a paint tool, and in part because I didn’t have time. Because, you know, flights.
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