Although I have had my bouts with various types of PDAs, I always gravitate back to steno pads or small sketch books for taking notes at work.
Pen and paper are hard to beat for creating the quick diagrams that help summarize the details of many Web and software projects, but they are also the only salvation one often has in the Slough of Despond that so many meetings seem to turn into so easily.
This page is devoted to drawings culled from meeting notebooks, so the quality (of the artwork and the materials) are all over the place.
The Elephant Man (Posted 11/26/2004)
I can't remember exactly when this was created. I'd guess early '90s, simply because the elephant has an uncanny resemblance to a former boss of mine. Done in pencil on cheap graph paper. For newspaper work, I always started with pencil and proceeded with a lot of swearing and erasing. The resulting drawing was then inked, which requires a steady hand with a rapidograph or pen holder and point ... it doesn't take much of a slip before you're, well, back at the drawing board erasing and swearing. The resulting inked drawing can be easily neatened up. Rogue pencil lines are removed with a Staedtler or other quality eraser, assuming you started with decent paper (2- or 3-ply bristol board works best for me ... cheap paper starts to fray quickly and that causes the ink to bleed). During my collegiate newspaper career, finished art was photographed and reduced in size, which sharpens the drawing. (Scanning works the other way ... imperfections become more glaring, requiring subsequent editing in Fireworks or Paint.)
Baseball Guy (Posted 11/25/2004)
This drawing is from roughly the same period as the Elephant Man, from a Strathmore sketch pad ... better paper but not great, and very sensitive to moisture. The digitizing process will capture warps in the paper (even under a flatbed scanner) when set to pick up the pencil lines. Scanning options can be set for Illustrations or Line Drawings, and that will omit the wrinkles ... and a lot of your object shading. An inked drawing suffers less in that case, although maintining any subtle shading is difficult.
Bishop Weasel (Posted 11/24/2004)
I don't have any particular religious axe to grind, so I don't know what I was thinking about with this guy. He looks sort of happy, so I suspect he just found the hat. The drawing is circa 2000, from a notepad devoted to a very tedious budget meeting. The image predates most of the media coverage of the sex abuse problems among the RC priesthood, so it wasn't an intentional social commentary either.
I Am the Eggman (Posted 11/23/2004)
It just started as a doodle of an egg. There is a half-hearted attempt at a strap for the overalls, as I remember thinking that it must have been impossible for Humpty Dumpty to keep his pants on. On second viewing, I almost wonder if this drawing started as a face (nose, eyes, mouth) and the egg outline happened afterwords. I like the Mickey Mouse gloves.
Dino Tracy (Posted 11/21/2004)
A lot of my notebook drawings are of different sorts of animals. At Penn State I drew cartoons about people, usually confused-looking versions of myself or friends, but most of what I produced had a stilted, amateur quality. A lot of getting beyond that involves just drawing a lot more, but it also means getting out of a comfort zone. A lot of artists fall into this trap ... you get a particular sort of drawing to work, a face making a certain kind of expression, for example, and the positive feedback causes you to repeat the drawing over and over. You even see this with noted artists ... Walt Disney's early letters are heavily populated with these sorts of recurring images.
I met Josef Rubinstein at a comic book convention at Duquesne University a year or so after graduation. Joe is the artist who inked a lot of John Byrne's best work in titles like X-Men and Captain America. While I was at Rubinstein's table, buying a page from a Captain America he had done with Byrne, Joe got to talking about "drawing from life", which quickly became an impromptu lecture on how an artist must "make himself draw all sorts of things". His point was that it makes no sense to see Spider-man leaping from a building if it doesn't look like a real building, or to see the Hulk wrap a streetlight around someone if it doesn't look like a streetlight.
A corollary to this idea is that personalities can be endowed on almost anything. A cartoon protagonist isn't restricted to the human species, but can be Roger Rabbit or Mickey Mouse or the Brave Little Toaster just as easily, as long as the rabbit, mouse, or household appliance is drawn well enough to sell the personality.
The Elephant Man (Posted 11/26/2004)
Baseball Guy (Posted 11/25/2004)
Bishop Weasel (Posted 11/24/2004)
I Am the Eggman (Posted 11/23/2004)
Dino Tracy (Posted 11/21/2004)