Puffin Socks

The bad news is, this feeling never goes away.

I like to begin my cartooning workshops with some warmup doodling, where I challenge the participants to draw a certain thing (often a cat or a car) in a limited amount of time, to get them to both find the essence of what it is they’re trying to represent, and also to hopefully get them to shake off some of the self-consciousness that they may be feeling in the beginning of a class that involves them drawing. Once we’ve completed that exercise is usually when I like to share this Puffin socks meme.

As I explain, to me, walking around the room and seeing everybody’s drawings is wonderful. I love seeing what people make, especially people who don’t make it a habit to draw much in their everyday life. A drawing is a way we can communicate without words, and someone’s sketches or doodles can give you some lovely insight to their inner lives. Beautiful Puffin socks.

But I know that all the participants probably aren’t feeling that way. They’re seeing their inside-out jacked-up looking Puffin socks, they’re seeing all the things they wish they’d done better and all the ways they’re frustrated by what they feel are their own limitations.

Then I share the bad news. That feeling is universal, and it never goes away. I’ve been working as a professional cartoonist for decades now, and I am in no way immune to this feeling. It’s forever. But, as I say in the cartoon above, I think that’s actually an encouraging thing to know, that all people feel that way about their drawings, even people who are theoretically more “good” at making art that others. We all feel this way, because we are always going to draw like ourselves. It’s like our handwriting, we are stuck with it. The only thing we can do is work to become the best version of ourselves. From there we go on to begin making that our artistic goal, for the remainder of the hour, and hopefully for the remainder of our lives.

The school year has begun. If you are a librarian or media specialist who may be interested in bringing a comics and cartooning focused assembly or hands-on workshop to your school or other institution, please check out my author visit website, I am offering some great incentives for events booked to take place during next Spring.

There are 21 days left in my Kickstarter to fund the creation of specialized ‘Zine Storage Boxes. In addition to the boxes, I am offering bundles that contain a lot of my self-published work, as well as more out there rewards, such as the opportunity to create a jam comic with me!

Thanks as always for reading along,

Mike