What will distinguish us from other methods of cartooning tuition is that we tackle cartooning from an 'ideas' point of view and not 'how-to-draw'. If another Cartooning school can't answer, or doesn't make a feature of the question "How do cartoonists think of jokes?", come back here. Why? Because if you're not funny, you're not published.
Cartooning is not a process where you succeed in drawing and THEN succeed in cartooning, If you can't tell a story, you're not going to succeed! People look at cartoons to be entertained, not to be impressed by a drawing.
This is why cartoonists with simple drawing styles are more popular than those with highly illustrated styles.
Our approach is geared towards having you produce one-off, gag cartoons because these form the foundation of any further activity in Cartooning you're likely to pursue. A cartoon drawing without an idea behind it isn't really cartooning (as far as we're concerned) so right from the start, let's be clear - there's more emphasis in our package on ideas than drawing.
What? No drawing lessons? What's going on?
Well, drawing is addressed but basically, whether or not it's important is a question of observation.
What we've observed over the years is that the most successful cartoon strips in history have been drawn with simple, childish styles. The most successful cartoonist in history? Arguably the man who drew dots for eyes! Click here for the Wikipedia entry. The most successful cartoonist in Australian history? Click here for his site. If you don't agree with this approach, well ... that's fine, there are plenty of sites to cater for a "drawing approach".
What's going on is that people look at cartoons to be entertained, not impressed by a drawing. In other words (and you'll pardon me if I highlight them), you don't have to succeed as an artist before you succeed in cartooning!
Cartooning is different from other art forms - the drawing is a vehicle for the idea and people are remarkably tolerant of simple, childish styles.
This is a tricky one because of an artificial division in our society called 'kids' and 'adults' and the implication that something you would teach to kids is of no value to adults and vice verca. Every time we encounter this we tell people that in that sense, the approach we take to cartooning is like the rules of chess. Chess can be effectively taught to people as young as 8 or 9 and to an adult. There is no question that adults won't benefit from this tuition though - one of Australia's most awarded cartoonists, Eric Loebbecke, was one who attended one of the first series of Ian Dalkin's Cartooning Workshops during the 1980s.
Life experience enhances your ability to generate (and understand) humour, so a 10 year old will probably produce simpler ideas than a 15 y.o. and the 15 y.o. will probably produce simpler ideas than a 20 y.o.
There's no one rule to cover this situation though. Let's just say that it's a bit of a curve - there are fewer people at age 10 who benefit from tuition than at 12, and fewer at 12 than at 15. When we ran the National Cartooning Competition, our experience was that kids as young as 8 or 9 were producing very good gag cartoons based on an earlier version of the resource but we didn't start to see 'better' gags untill about age 10/11/12.
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