What’s the difference between drawing and doodling? Both have aesthetic ends. Both involve making marks on a surface. Both are fun.
The difference, then, must be that doodling is more about the repetitive pleasure of creating lines on a surface than any specific artful end. Drawing is about form; doodling is about the way a pen feels in the hand. But presumably there’s some crossover between the two.
Actually, considerable crossover. Cheeming Boey’s styrofoam cups exist in that gray area between one and the other. Art? Or just the product of doinking around? Whatever they are, they sure look cool.
When we did a post on the tools of the trade a while back, some of you commented that your notebooks of choice were Field Notes. After investigating the matter, we agree that their products are a necessary addition to the notebook arsenal.
An honest memo book, worth fillin’ up with GOOD INFORMATION is what the company calls their notebook; inspirations include “the vanishing subgenre of agricultural memo books, ornate pocket ledgers and the simple, unassuming beauty of a well-crafted grocery list.”
Say no more! Well, maybe a little more. Field Notes are durable, naturally, but more importantly: they’re pocket-sized and flexible. In other words, they’re built for the road, and there’s no excuse not to carry yours around everywhere. Available in all the standard denominations––ruled paper, graph paper, plain––the books also include suggestions on how to use them, for those at a loss. Examples: Road Trip Mileage, Shady Transactions, Crop Predictions. You’ll find that you probably won’t need the suggestions; in these fast-paced modern days, there’s always something to write about.
There’s a reason why everyone in 4th grade math doodled cubes, barns and bubbly letters: creating the illusion of 3-dimensional objects satisfies some basic human urge. There is probably an evolutionary cause for it––some sort of adaptive benefit obtained from cool shading techniques and eye-popping shapes. For now, we’ll just call it fun.
Luckily, the feeling of sketching a sweet 3D shooting star can be recaptured. Not only recaptured, in fact, but improved upon! These days you can get 3D drawing kits that include a pad of stereoscopic graph paper (intersecting red and blue lines) and 3D glasses. It works like this: first, you sketch with a regular black pen. Then you put on the glasses. The filters in the 3D specs allow each eye to see only the opposite color on the graph paper, and as the brain melds the two images together our focal point is pushed backwards. Voila: the illusion of depth. Really, it never gets old.
An abstract comic? What the hell is that? And more importantly, what’s the point of a comic if it doesn’t tell a story?
These are the questions a book like Abstract Comics raises right off the bat. Thankfully, it also answers them. The anthology, edited by Andrei Molotiu, covers the time period of 1967-2009 and is in all respects a Serious (capital S) volume. The cover is hefty, the pages are thick, the introduction is lengthy and–inhale deeply– there are footnotes.
In his intro, Molotiu offers the definition of abstract comics are “sequential art consisting exclusively of abstract imagery”. So far so good. The definition expands from here on to include “comics that contain some representational elements, as long as those elements do not cohere into a narrative.” Also good. R. Crumb is mentioned, as is de Kooning and Lichtenstein; abstract comics are compared to abstract film, and from there on out, it’s best to just flip through the book for examples of what Molotiu is talking about.
And there are some fine examples to discover. Damien Jay, Bill Boichel, Warren Craighead III and a host of other contributors are represented in a volume dedicated to a niche that most of us haven’t even conceived of. Worth a look, for sure, and maybe more.
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