Advice from Frank King in the 1926 book HOW TO DRAW CARTOONS by Clare Briggs:
“There is one thing I tell students who want advice about cartooning; that is, to carry a paper pad and a pencil and make sketches of everything—people in every attitude, chairs, animals, boats, buildings, automobiles—literally everything. Make hundreds and thousands of them. It will help in every way when they get to doing cartoons. If persisted in they can build a fine foundation for any sort of cartooning they undertake. The beginners will find themselves becoming skillful at suggesting a face or an attitude directly and simply. They will forget all the sketches of things they have made, but they will find many of them coming back when they need them. Get some fun out of it and the beginner improves rapidly.My advice to the beginner or the advanced student—sketch everything in sight.”
Excellent!
Invigorating to look at, and the quote reminds me of how I am constantly writing either narrative description or verse in my head about what I’m experiencing. Following Isherwood’s lead (“I am a camera”), but with language.
The sketchbook looks like those black-and-white test-taking volumes, but the stamped date in the upper left-hand corner was intriguing — do you add that yourself? Do you have a little ink stamper? How endearing.
When we were living with her parents, I found a library stamp in my wife’s old room, so I use that to stamp the date on the page. :-D