I rarely sketch out my cartoon ideas before I begin work on them.  Nearly always, I picture it in my mind.  I have a good imagination.  Maybe too good.  I can disappear into it for hours at a time.   My political cartoons begin as imagery that just comes to mind as I read about, or think about current events.  Occasionally I'll grab one as it passes by, and work on it, entirely inside my brain.  When I actually start to draw something, I almost always approach the paper seeing what I want to draw clearly and exactly in my mind.  This is pretty much how I draw and paint everything, the only difference being when I paint I will do a quick color study first. 

As the fight over California Proposition 8 approached voting day, I had two cartoons already done inside my head, one of which I hoped I wouldn't have to draw.  Had the vote gone the other way, I might have just waited until the weekend to do the other, more light-hearted one.  It might even have stayed on the drawing board, like so many other half-finished cartoons have this past year.  But this pretty much expresses how I feel right now, and I just had to get it out now.  I have nearly two months of vacation time stored up at work, and I took the day off (mostly…I still had things I had to do from home) so I could get this out of my system…

Copyright © November 5, 2008 by Bruce Garrett
All Rights Reserved.

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It's horrible to say it…but I have a new-found interest in doing these now.  And…more spare time to do them since I'm not visiting people I know down in Washington every Friday-Saturday now.  But that's another spill-my-guts-out story for another time…