A Tale of Two Roughs

I had to laugh when I finished my work Monday and looked at the two pencil roughs that led up to my two finished cartoons for the day. I thought you might enjoy seeing the range of degrees to which I remain faithful to my original sketches.

A pencil rough is usually nothing more than the quick capture of an idea so I won't forget it. It contains nothing more than the essential elements of the idea -- no fussing with shading, details, backgrounds and so on. The rough serves as a sort of road map as I move to my bristol board and begin more carefully laying out the drawing.

Pencil roughs are especially valuable on the days when I have only a slippery grasp on an idea and proceed to spend hours twisting and turning it to improve it. Along the way I frequently get lost, losing touch with the essence of the original thought as I play with ever cleverer captions and expressions. At the end of such a process I may take a break and walk away from the idea, only to return and realize I've completely lost touch with the reader as I ventured further and further from home.

That's when having that original seed of an idea penciled in front of me can be invaluable. It brings me back to the spark that drove the idea.

The pencil rough for the Slave Pen cartoon could hardly be more basic. (This is a local topic using imagery from our financially troubled Underground Railroad Freedom Center, which is appealing to taxpayers for a bailout.) There's the idea boiled down to its kernel. In finishing the cartoon I spent a lot of time tweaking the composition, suggesting texture and adding details from photos I found online. All of this just made the drawing richer while respecting the simplicity of the idea.

As I began the other cartoon (Bush as Alfred E. Neuman), I found myself trying to replicate the goofiness of the pencil rough as I transferred the idea to my good paper. After a bunch of tries, I realized I liked virtually everything about the rough better than any subsequent version (see aborted half-finished drawing), so I blew the dust off of an old light box I have stashed behind a file cabinet and traced the rough onto the good board. You'll notice I've changed as little as possible in inking the final piece.