Cartoons and Visual Art 6

Side-scrollers.

I call some of my cartoons “side-scrollers” because they are partly influenced by side-scroller video games. The Nintendo 16-bit aesthetic is important to me. I say this most especially with reference to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (I know, not technically a side-scroller), Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World. I am in no way exaggerating by saying that I consider these games to be among the most beautiful artworks ever created. I’m also proud of having played fully through them all, though I admit I couldn’t crack all of the hidden extra content in Donkey Kong Country without an official players’ guide, and didn’t get around to beating the other two games until adulthood as a hobby with my girlfriend at the time.

While playing them as an adult I had lots of time to reflect on their content. There’s something profound to me about how those particular games intertwined narrative and graphic conceptualizations of the whimsically fantastical, mind-expandingly futuristic and primally atavistic within cartoonishly economical design choices under the constraints of 16-bit programming technology. I realized that these games had and have a significant effect on my visual sensibility, both as a budding young cartoonist who liked to imagine his own video games by toiling over hypothetical maps and character sheets, and as a working grownup cartoonist who likes practicing repetitive craft for the sake of getting better at it.

This is my latest “side-scroller” on polar coordinate paper. It is imaginatively entitled Twenty-Eight Dinosaurs.

For this drawing I penciled all of the dinosaurs first, plotting out where I wanted each one on the page.

Then I inked and colored all of the dinosaurs except for the ceratopsians, which I inked but did not color in. I wanted those to camouflage in with whatever patterning metastasized into the environment of the piece. For all of the other dinosaurs I selected a consistent color palette for each imaginary species:

Then I started in the middle, as I often do, and began to zone outwards on patterning. For this time around I wanted all of the more cognitively-demanding work of design and penciling out of the way up front and all of the meditative inking on the back end. To put it another way, I wanted all of the music work first and all of the podcast work last.

And, making use of all this fancy technology, what with all the silicon chips and such, I’ve gotten into sometimes taking progress photos on my more demanding and time-consuming pieces so that I can turn the process itself into a work of art, or some bullshit. Here is that.

I have several ambitious ideas for how I want to enliven the next dinosaur side-scroller, but first I’m going to take a breather and work on a few other things that are less time-consuming. More on that when I have something to share.