Did you know I could draw? Er, did you at least know that I have drawn? Whether or not it's a skill I can actually claim is a separate matter from whether I've attempted it, which, as it happens, I have.
Nothing fancy, mind you. I don't have any particular artistic gift like some do. I once had a friend who was one of those people who could capture something in their mind's eye and then accurately replicate it in some drawn medium. I'm not like that, so I tend to stay towards the cartoonish, where accurate representations aren't so important. As long as the object of what you're trying to convey is recognizable, that's usually enough.
Still, even the cartoonish requires some sort of technique, and in this respect I'm grateful to one of my friends in high school for telling me that I had some instinct for it. He used to sketch comics effortlessly and often. Most of them were satirical looks at our physics class, which, though somewhat esoteric, were actually pretty funny. He established some consistent conventions throughout his comics for how certain people would be characterized. (Nothing mean, just some gentle ribbing.) For example there was one classmate whose intelligence made him seem more akin to a 52 year old physics Ph.D. than the17 year old high school student he was. So my classmate always drew him with an overly inflated head orbited by electrons.
I borrowed the convention for one of my first comics. I'm sure I still have it, somewhere, but I can't currently find it. So instead of a picture, a thousand words will have to do... In this comic the teacher has asked the class a question. In the second panel the entire class gives the same answer, represented only by about a half-a-dozen quote bubbles entering and filling the space from all directions. In the third panel, the large, inflated and orbited head appears, with my classmate giving a completely different answer, which in the final panel the teacher confirms is correct. Part of me originally thought the second panel was a bit of a cop-out, since by using the quote bubbles I didn't have to draw the whole class. But my friend gave it high praise as an effective cartooning technique. Who really wanted to see all those people drawn out anyway? The point (upon which the humor was ultimately created) was to represent the unanimous chorus, and that's just what I'd done.
Since then I've only drawn a bit here and there, but a few years ago there was a period where I tried to take drawing more seriously. A friend of mine was on an autocross team called "Track Monkeys," so I decided to draw them a mascot:
It's probably one of my best drawings ever, and probably because it's the one I took most seriously. It may or may not be the most brilliant picture ever, but what regularly perplexes me with an "I did that?" sort of confusion is that it really did come out looking exactly like I'd visualized it.
More recently I've tried going back to the comics, and a few months ago I did this one, "Tales from the Boardroom." Like it says at the top, it really was drawn from a real life story. (The Internet boom years were a strange time indeed...) Which may be why I'm a little lukewarm on it - it's almost too true to be funny... I do like it though because it was a chance to work further with the technique of using different viewpoints and dialog indicators to tell the story, which I need to be able to do, given my limited artistry.
Still, if I can manage to tell a story that's funny, then I'm happy. Towards that end I did this one a few years ago, around the time of the Track Monkey, that's still my favorite. Maybe someday I'll even do a sequel for it as I'm sure there's more silliness to explore in "The Adventures of Vacuous Man"....