Last night, was pretty amazing — I became professional, if you consider the definition of professional being compensated for your work, where amateur is just doing it for the love of it.
As many of you know, I enjoy drawing cartoons and comics for the fun of it. Back in college, my chosen medium was paper napkins. Over time, a small set of characters have developed, including a number of strange recurring subcharacters, such as Fred The Plant that sometimes acts as the main character’s alternate ego.
I never really thought the drawings themselves were particularly amazing, but rather it was the relevancy to the topic or moment and the delivery that made the humor good, or at least mildly entertaining, especially when you put my work against someone else’s. I experimented with trying to draw my comics directly into the computer, but they ended up blocky. Deciding I needed a hybrid approach, I did the mock up via paper and the drawing via computer, yielding an interesting look, but this is super time consuming. It wasn’t until I talked with a real comic book artist at my work that I learned how the professionals were transferring images in mere minutes. Apparently that was the easy part, and he’s been providing mentorship to get me to draw more crisp and clearly, use perspective better, give more character to the drawing, and do some inking. My respect and empathy for all comic book artists and illustrators has gone through the roof — it’s hard work that is time consuming, unappreciated, and often unrecognized because they make it look so easy.
As such, wanting to keep things simple for the time being, I continue to produce one-of-a-kind cartoons on the backs of napkins, only now they don’t look as sketchy as the online archives, but more like the style you see in the upper right hand corner.
Given you made it this far, I figure you’re looking for the point to the story, or at least some explanation of the first paragraph. Well, it just so happens I can fulfill that need.
For that past few weeks, we’ve been going to the Texas Roadhouse for dinner. And, like always, I’ve been doodling and cartooning on the drink napkins while waiting for the food to arrive.
The way it usually goes is that some topic or something comes up at the table, and I see how many cartoons I can whip out before the food arrives. As each one is finished it gets passed around the table. At the end of dinner, if anyone has a favorites, they keep them. The rest are left on the table as discarded trash. Survival of the fittest provides me feedback of what worked and what didn’t.
It was at college that these discards managed to make their way back to the kitchen by accident. However, in our case, as we were building the pile of cartoons to sort through at the end, our waitress thought they were for her and took them.
On an aside, I’ve been doing an Adkins like diet, so it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that during one week, we went to this place four times. Actually, I should be more specific in that *I* went to this place four times, and the friends that came with me were varied. Steak is good, but some people tire out if that’s all one eats.
Needless to say, each dinner yielded more and more cartoons, and those all got taken back to the kitchen. What I later learned was that the kitchen was unaware WHO was producing the cartoons, just that some patron would show up and by the time they got the humor, he was was gone.
Last night, they caught me. The moment the first pre-meal cartoon was stolen, the manager came out and told me that he and the kitchen staff really enjoyed the cartoons. He had passed them on to the owner of the store, and that they had been passed around corporately. Even at that moment, as we spoke, two of my napkin cartoons were sitting under the glass of the CEO’s desk.
At first I thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t.
See, one of the things that’s interesting about the majority of my cartoons is that they follow me around. If I’m in a steak restaurant, then so are the characters. And in this case, Texas Roadhouse had a whole set of themed cartoons that looked like the inside of their restaurant and having the characters deal with very relevant food and situational issues, hence the strong appeal.
Well, I continued drawing as we waited for out food to come out. And, truth be told, with an audience I also drew a little through dinner as well.
When it came time for the bill, it didn’t look right. It looked too low. The waitress explained that my meal wasn’t being charged for. I suspect my jaw hit the table at that moment. The manager came out, thanked me for the next in the series, and informed me that they were going to take their favorites, frame them, and put them on the wall. So that by the next time I head over there to eat, my artwork will be a permanent fixture on the wall. Obviously, I was stunned.
So, technically, this meal represented compensation, which revoked my amateur cartoonist status.