Thursday, December 20, 2012

2012 in Review: Andy Conlan



What have been your personal cartooning/comics highlights of 2012?
 
I did a political cartoon for which I drew a caricature of John Key, which made me feel like a "real editorial cartoonist". Political cartoons aren't really my thing, but it was fun for the context of it. He was the easy part. I wanted to draw an authentic rendition of the corner of Sunset and Vine for the environment, so I even Google mapped it. It got too complicated until I finally said “fuckit”, and just drew the street signs and some hills behind them. The hills are probably even the wrong shape, but I think I captured Key's gleeful enthusiasm.

Who are some of the comics creators that you've discovered and enjoyed for the first time in 2012?
 
Does rediscover count? Near the beginning of the year I started this Carl Barks frenzy, going into this total vacuum for a few weeks during which a disproportionate part of my waking hours were spent thinking about Uncle Scrooge. I also spent a lot of time reading Schultz. Another highlight was corresponding with Herr Seele about getting one of his Cowboy Henk books. He was concerned that the book was in Dutch, but there was no adequate way to articulate to him that his cartoons are so wonderfully executed that they need no text. Sometimes you can become so sycophantic that it's better to play it cool and not go overboard.

What is something non-comics that you have enjoyed in 2012? (i.e. movies, film, prose, ballet, opera, fine art, exhibitions, etc)
 
I spent a bit of time at auctions this year, overcome with panic whenever works by the late Sir Peter Siddell were on the floor. His work has been a mild obsession for me since I was at high school, so it was an opportunity to see some of the lesser known paintings and other works that aren't held publicly.

Have you implemented any significant changes to your working methods this year?
 
Not really, I've been working the same way since 1995, with a brush and ink. I did go from doing everything on the page to drawing panels separately and assembling them using Photoshop, but I don't like that so I switched back. I prefer to have a page of original art that is a standalone piece of work on its own outside the “post production” environment, so prefer to keep it all on paper.

What are you looking forward to in 2013?
 
I've got some renewed interest in the children's stories I've been working on, so any non editorial comics or illustrative work will be for young readers. I've been working out how to translate the stories and books to moving image, and have seen a hybrid stop motion/2D drawing video that I quite liked, so might adapt that format for my own stuff. A video of me reading my children's book, Mr. Gloomingdale's Downpour, has had a decent amount of views on Youtube for something that's not about cats squeezing each others' blackheads while wearing top hats, so adapting that will be one of the first experiments.

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