I'm on Facebook!

Yes, it's a new frontier for Brainwaves et al. So come see me! I fould a thing called Pieces of Flair that lets you make little buttons and the Ipps look good on there. I'll send you one! Anyway, come on down!

Big Thoughts About Little Drawings: Baby Names

So, my name is generally used to refer to baseball bats, guns and cows. I don't really know what to make of that. I've never known what to make of that. I don't think the cow part is a good thing. Or the gun part. Baseball bats are okay, I guess.

Every year someone publishes a list of the most popular baby names of the year. For some people, these are names to use - for others, they are the ones to avoid.

One unforeseen effect of the name you choose is what happens when you name your kid after someone. At first, it's neat because you think of that special person whenever you talk to your kid. On the other hand, when you're really mad, you end up yelling your friend's or relative's name. Which is weird.

Eventually, the kid will grow into the name and make it his or her own. Hopefully. But in the meantime, it's astounding how many times you're gonna say/yell/screech that name yourself. So make it a good one.

More Cartoons on My Website!

I've updated my website to include a lot more sample cartoons - somehow a sampling of 24 panels out of a library of 1,600 seemed pretty inadequate. So I've added links to more samples off the Favorite Cartoons page - and broken them up into subject matter like Working and Business or Arts, Culture or the Lack Thereof, or Kids and Parenting, or Environment and Science. Hope you enjoy browsing through some more favorites. Tell your friends!

Take an Ipp to the Store!!

Alright, one of my favorite people in the world helped me come up with this bag with a tree-hugging Ipp for groceries and all your various whatnot.
If you're trying to convince your friends to stop using paper or plastic bags, one way to do this is to give them a great bag to use.
It's also a great way to say, "I love the Earth so much I'm using these bags. Which makes me extra cool."
This one is washable too, which is great when your groceries get icky stuff on the inside of your bags.
Tip: I have quite a few bags like these, and I keep them both in the house and in the car - because sometimes I get to the store only to realize that I forgot to bring bags. Then I put them near the kitchen door too so I see them on my way out and get em back into the car...
Anyway, enjoy! And if you think someone you know would like these, send em a link! You can just click the little email button at the bottom of the post to send it along. Yay!

What the Heck is an Ipp?

Well, an ipp is... um, well, it's this thing.

They may be made out of jelly beans.

Or marshmallows.

We're not sure.

What I do know is, I've put one on a t-shirt.

And, there are more where that came from.

So watch out for the Ipps!

BTALD: Compatibly Odd.

This cartoon appears in the February Funny Times. It pretty much sums up what I've figured out about marriage - the ones that last are the ones where the parties are compatibly odd.

People go around looking for the person who's the best-looking, or richest, or whatever, but let's face it - we're best off with someone who is the right kind of strange. Even if that means being so normal it's kind of.. weird.

Draw.

Alright, this is an image that I drew to promote the drawing classes I teach at my daughter's school's afterschool center. I dressed it up and put it on a journal to encourage doodling. Get one for your favorite budding artist!

All Hail the Heater Vent.

Here's to everybody out there who's COLD today. Like, everybody in the Northern Hemisphere. You Australians, I hope you're enjoying your fabulous summer. You deserve it.

Our cat has a heater vent that's under a cabinet in the bathroom. It's like his own personal sauna. That was the inspiration for this drawing.

Art and Global Warming

When I was a kid, I produced a whole lotta art. Even long after I'd moved out and graduated with college, my parents still had a whole laundry hamper in my old closet filled with drawings and paintings and pastels and what-have-you.

Now, if you foster a love of drawing and general mark-making in your kids, well, they're gonna draw. A lot. On things.

This does not have to mean you must create a vast wasteland of used up paper and dead trees.

We all know about the problem of drawing on furniture and walls and other non-drawing surfaces. For this I advocate lots of washable markers. And in nice weather, chalk for outside. Our son tried to convert his room into outer space by drawing space ships and planets on his walls and door. It was pretty clever. We took pictures of it before trying to wash it off. We tried not to admire it too much in front of him, though. I was very stern and all that.

Then, there's paper. We all know that we should be recycling, and re-using the backs of things is great. Cardboard from packaging is really nice. Let em make marks, then recycle the whole kit-and-caboodle. Let em color the funnies. If you like something, take a picture of it first. Or, use it to make a greeting card to send to the grandparents.

But if you really want to be environment-savvy, get your kids a white board or a chalk board. A big one for their wall, or a small one to carry around. Both are great because they are tactile, and you can draw by erasing too. MagnaDoodles are okay, but not as easy to use. And the magnet stuff starts sticking when it shouldn't after about the zillionth drawing.

The impermanence of a white board or chalk board I think is healthy, too. It tells kids that the act of drawing is what's important, and you don't have to frame everything in order for it to be valuable. And, a drawing can evolve - get partially erased, get mutated, whatever. It's a living thing.

Oh, and if your kid draws on the white board with a permanent marker (yike, how did they get a permanent marker?! Probably the same way they do at my house -- I have no idea), just do this: Go over it with a white board marker, then erase. I learned that in corporate-land.

There. Drawing does not have to mean wasting paper. Isn't that great?

Love.

Okay now that I've blathered on about art awhile, here is some.

It's a little early for Valentine's, but here's what mine's going to look like this year.

Art and Emotions

Okay I promise I'll get back to the cartoons pronto. However, this is important stuff. Darn it.

When my daughter was 3 or so, she was being really cranky. Especially at her dad. So one day, I handed her a piece of paper and asked her to draw something about how she felt.

She drew a picture of Daddy, going off to work - complete with his suit and briefcase - walking into a giant erupting volcano. I said, "It looks like you're worried that when Daddy leaves he's not coming back." She nodded. After that, I was able to reassure her because I knew what was on her mind.

Could she have explained that abstract feeling in words? Probably not. Anyone who is around kids a fair amount knows that the relationship between what words they say and what is actually going on is tenuous at best. Is it because they are liars? No, it's because talking is just one tool in the whole box and sometimes it just doesn't do the job.

Yesterday I spent some time drawing with Kindergarteners. Now, you don't teach Kindergarteners how to draw a horse or how to do animation. But when you give them a pencil and some paper, something great happens. They turn into storytellers. "This is the rocket, and this is my cat, and the dog fell out the window, and the rocket is on fire." This is all explained along with various pencil marks. Lots of back and forth scribbles can mean something is on fire. When something goes fast, they take the pencil and zoom it across the paper, and make the appropriate sound effects. A lot of my job is to listen and ask questions.

Kids can tell stories with a pencil in their hands that they wouldn't otherwise tell. They can offer insights into what is on their minds. They can describe their inner world. It is not important whether their drawing is accurate, just that it is expressive. I often take their marks and tape them up on the wall to show that they are important.

So if you know a child who is struggling with expressing something, or you suspect that what's coming out isn't telling the whole story, or you're just having a hard time connecting, get a pencil and some paper. Watch and ask questions. And let the story unfold.

There's a difference between reproducing something in art and representing something in art. Even the realistic religious paintings of the Renaissance were not just there to reproduce what things looked like. They represented what was important to the people of that time, what was on their minds. So even a realistic painting isn't just a literal reproduction of something. It has feelings and priorities.

More recently art has been showing more literally how things feel, by way of Cubism or Impressionism or Expressionism. In filmmaking, we've done the same thing. "The Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind" is a great example. So is "Fight Club." Graphic novels put both things together, kind of like movies in book form.

So, let that inner world out. As Dr. Seuss said, "Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air."

Art Rant #1

Many of you know that I teach drawing and animation to kids. I've been doing this a few years now, and I'm finding that there is more demand for my services than I have time in the week. It's like watering a really, really dry houseplant.

Anyway, here is the first of my Art Rants. There's more where this came from. Feel free to forward it to anybody and everybody.

Art Rant #1

Look around you. Everything you can see is designed, from the products you use to the movies you watch to the buildings you work in to the parks you play in. All that stuff started out as a design that made the journey from imagination to reality. Even nature creates some of the most amazing, crazy and beautiful designs you could ever ask for.

Design is made using tools. There is architecture for buildings, modeling for automobiles, information design for websites. There are storyboards for movies and animations, schematics for machinery and electronics, mockups for toys, DNA for people.

This means that a child growing up today has enormous opportunities to imagine and shape the future of our world in ways big and small. Every industry, from filmmaking to product design to retail to airlines to hospitals and beyond needs design in order to function. But where does design come from?

Design comes from art, because art teaches us to visualize. Every design must be put in a form that can be seen, understood, and communicated by all sorts of people. Ideas must be tested to see if they will work. Leonardo da Vinci has a few examples.

Art teaches us how to take abstract ideas and put them out into the world. Art lets us see and solve spatial, compositional, creative, real-world problems. Art teaches us how to parse visual information, whether we created it or not. Art, in short, completes the human brain’s functionality.

Many people will say, “I’m just not good at art.” We don’t tell people they can’t use letters or words because they are not Mark Twain. We don’t tell people they can’t use numbers because they are not Stephen W. Hawking. We should not tell people that they can’t use pictures because they are not Pablo Picasso.

Is a design just a picture? Of course not. It can be a complicated mix of visuals, numbers and words that describe a bridge that won’t fall down, an aircraft carrier that will stay afloat, or a stage set that won’t squish the actors.

Can you imagine an airplane schematic written out in prose, or the specs for a piece of medical equipment expressed only in numbers? Of course not. But the designs for both of these things can mean the difference between life and death for everyday people.

So: The next time you hear someone say that we don’t “need” arts education, then point out that if we don’t need arts education, then we obviously don’t “need” houses, bridges, airplanes, cars, appliances, medical devices, movies, television, furniture, cell phones, clothing(!), or anything else you might see. Because by treating art as a nonessential, specialized skill rather than as a human way of thinking and communicating, we are making ourselves dumber by ignoring a tool we have used since prehistory and that shapes much of the world around us.

Thanks for reading. Betsy

Retail Detox

So, last night my 3 1/2 -year-old and I needed to get a present for a birthday party he's going to this weekend.
This involved darkening the door of the ever-popular Target, otherwise known as The Big Store Where Mommy and Daddy ALWAYS Buy Me Something.
Now, the reason for this is because we almost never go to Target, except when we actually need something. And that something is usually a kid-related thing. Being Target and all.
However, in the 3-year-old mind, this has translated to the idea that one gets "a box of cars" every time without exception or the Earth will spin into the Sun you just watch.
Anyway, the drawing here is what resulted after my son wailed for a full hour about how he wanted some cars. Fortunately, the thing we were buying was nowhere near the cars aisle, so we got our stuff and got the hell out.
But this did not prevent volcanic interplanetary bellowing. Even when it was clear he didn't really know what he was saying. And after I pointed out we were no longer at the store.
I'm going to call this "retail detox." And I plan to do it again. No kidding. We are so good at making people WANT things in this country. I mean, this is a kid who sees almost no commercial TV. But he's a good little consumer, man.
Anyway, after a few more trips into Retail Land without buying anything I think his withdrawal symptoms will start to wear off. It really is like withdrawal. But I'm there with him, man. I'm gonna help him through.

BTALD: The House Whisperer

Winter is probably the time we learn the most about whatever structure we live in: Where the rainwater goes, where the snow piles up, which trees looked good but were actually ready to give up the ghost...
We live right next to a drainage creek that only has water in it in the winter. When you wake up in the morning, you can listen for the creek to know whether there was rain the night before.
Houses also seem to get sick like people - a bunch of stuff happens at once. Too bad we can't get flu shots for houses. Oh wait, I guess that's called maintenance. But if you don't know what's gonna blow up, how do you know what to maintain? I have no idea. I just figure if I know how to shut off the water I'll be okay. Always know how to shut off the water.
Oh, and just one little hint - those little valves in back of your toilet? The ones that are supposed to shut off the water supply? They don't work. If they're old. Don't do a darn thing. You've gotta shut off the water to the whole place. Don't ask me how I know this. It involved a lot of yelling and running around outside. But that was the old house - I hope it's being nice to its current owners.

BTALD: Compliments of...

So it's a New Year, when we're supposed to get all Big-Picture and try and resolve to do things differently. Or, boycott the process because we think it's dumb. Whichever you prefer.

If you don't have any particular resolutions, or can't think of any, I'd like to propose one: Pay more compliments.

You can make a person's whole week just by saying something nice to them. I know that when I get an email from a reader saying a cartoon made them laugh or they put it up in their office or sent it to a friend, that makes my whole career worthwhile. Seriously.

It's a really big deal for people to feel like they are seen. We do so much seeing of celebrities and lifestyles and reality TV and cheap plastic junk and... and...

What really makes a difference to a person is to BE seen.

And if you pay someone a compliment, it means you saw them and you noticed them.

So, that may not be a big ol' resolution like losing 50 pounds or traveling somewhere or whatever, but then if you did those things it would all be so worth it if someone complimented YOU on your tan, or how slim you are... see?