Thin people look younger. Take heed, Los Angeles.
Topic for Illustration Friday: skinny.
This is also Wordless Wednesday, but forget that idea right now. I will never be wordless. Back when people designed stationary I designed some for editors that said at the bottom, …because pictures speak louder with words. A cartoon is not an illustration, and vice versa!
In a good cartoon, the words and pic work together, and one without the other isn’t so funny. If the gag doesn’t work, it’s just stupid. But if it’s a good gag, you need to up your drawing to keep pace with it, and make it even better. There’s a background, a time and place and future in a good cartoon. It’s your stage, so use it wisely.
I did this cartoon for my 2nd book, Love Me or Go To Hell: True Love Cartoons. One of my great cartoon contributors, Stephanie Piro, had thought up the first part of the title a few years ago, and offered it for this project. I added the 2nd part, to make sure readers knew it was a book about loving men, not hating them!??
Anyway, my excellent editor Erin, at Andrews McMeel gave me carte blanche on what cartoons to include in the book, and even the focus. I decided to aim this at 20-something women – say, 25 to 35.
I had done this cartoon in a different form I started work on the book, and this was one of the first cartoons where I discovered that to make someone look younger, you must make them skinny! This is easy to prove in cartoons. After all, the face is simplified, hair the same in a cartoon, most of the time, except for glasses, white hair, less hair on an older man, etc.. But a more portly woman always always looks older, and if you just take 30 pounds off her, wowee! Which proves that all you have to do to look younger is lose weight!
Is this the same in real life? I’M AFRAID, YES!! I just saw someone on the news running for governor of Atlanta, Mary Norwood, a tiny little thing, in her late fifties, and she looks terrific.
Of course, I live in LA now, home of Pilates and yoga. And skinny rules.
Cartoon caption: I don’t want to see you anymore, Gary. I just hate it when men try to sell you t-shirts (tee shirts) afterwards.
PS. If you still have a hankering for Halloween cartoons, did a bunch on The Opposite of Wrong!
ha ha
Donna
It’s been two years since you put a comment on my blog (which I’m NOW just starting to use again!)
I’m at http://iinkthereforeidan.blogspot.com/
You made a comment about me being an inspiration.
No matter how much I succeed at this business there are still some things I have not done that make me feel like a failure in some respects. One is not ever having been in the NYer. I ask myself, “How could I have never appeared in the New Yorker?
I must be doing something wrong. There are cartoonists in there who do work not unlike the sort of stuff with me.
Pretend you are in your 20s. Get a feminine or minority name. Make your drawings look more like grade school drawings, or at least someone who has only done it for a few months.
And be less funny, because every year the New Yorker rewards us with less funny and surprising work.