Candorville timelapse drawing: Lemont, Clyde and C-Dog

Watch a drawing of the main characters from my syndicated comic strip Candorville, from sketch, to inks, to colors.

Art therapy. That’s why I began drawing. It’s why everyone begins drawing, to escape from the world you’re in and create a new one that’s completely under your control. The paper or the canvas is the universe, and you are the God. That’s why it’s so frustrating if you can’t put on paper what you see in your mind’s eye.

My mom’s an artist, and when I was three years old, she taught me all the tricks she knew to help me realize my visions. Three point perspective, cross-hatching, and reflected light. Contour drawing, emphasis, balance, asymmetry, focal points… thanks to my mom, I was employing all of these concepts in my art before I was old enough for preschool.

What my mom didn’t know, she taught me anyway by buying me every book she could find, from How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, to An Atlas of Anatomy for Artists. I learned pretty quickly that the one common denominator with all those books, from the more cartoony ones to the most realistic, was that at the heart of every person or animal, is a stick figure. Here’s a Timelapse video of three stick figures turning into fully realized characters.