“I knew Charles Schulz” Shannon said as I scribbled her caricature in thick-black outline in the back corner of an award ceremony at the Grand Williston Hotel. “You knew ‘The’ Charles Schulz?” I said. “Yes” she said. “The legendary creator of ‘Peanuts’ Charles Schulz?” “Yes” she said, “he taught at Northern Illinois in the early nineties when I was an art undergraduate.” “Must’ve been surreal” I said, “being under the tutelage of the most influential cartoonist of the twentieth century?” “I was too young to comprehend how important he is at the time, but looking back I know now I was in the presence of a true-creator.” “Wow...” I said, “what was his teaching like?” “He made us draw from life a lot” she said. “Still lifes?” I said, “models, figures, busts...?” “Yes” Shannon said, “All that. And we’d go out as a class and draw landscapes, trees on campus, and cars in the parking lot...anything in life was fair game.” As I finished the drawing with the next eager person in line, I shook Shannon’s hand and said “Thank you for your story on a man who’s had resounding influence on aspiring creatives like me.”
As I packed up after drawing the six stylists at ‘All the Rage’ hair studio over two near-beers after the show, and blowin’ n’ goin’ to the American State Bank back lot with spray-fixative aerosol cans jingling in my cartoon-supply messenger-bag ascending to the downtown loft, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Shannon said, “He made us draw from life a lot...”
I pulled ‘Hot Tips: From Top Comic Creators’ off the book shelf. A book I bought over twenty years ago at Gatekeeper Comic, Topeka, Kansas on 29th and Macvicar before it relocated off Gage Avenue next to Churchill’s the cigar shop. It’s a quote book from cartoon professionals sharing their hard-earned industry secrets. I scoured every page looking for Schulz quotes in hopes I’d glean more insight from the man who had more impact on the industry than most cartoonists dream of and told a woman I just met that life drawing is the foundation for an arts education.
I came to a quote halfway through the book on page sixty-one, “People always used to ask me about what they call writer’s block. I say writer’s block is for amateurs. Cartoonists are like professional actors. The curtain goes up and you step out on stage and you do it. A cartoonist knows that the paper comes out every day, and so you do it.” I laughed as rain sprinkled the skylight overhead and kept reading.
I sifted through Schulz quotes on editors preferring reliability and consistency over quality, to being mindful of falling into slumps where you can’t judge your work. Towards the latter third of the book on page seventy-eight in the chapter ‘Style, Shapes and Substance’ a ‘Peanuts’ creator quote rang true to what Shannon told me earlier —
“There was an old time cartoonist, Frank Wing, and he was of the school where everything should be drawn quite accurately. I used to listen to him telling students, ‘Draw from life, draw from life. Take a shoe and place it across the room from yourself and draw it from different angles. Draw the wrinkles in people’s clothes.’ From that you can later exaggerate in your drawing.”
An artist known the world over for cartooning over-sized headed children in squiggly black ink for nearly five decades, told his students, quoting the realist, Frank Wing, that life drawing is the truest path to higher creative draftsmanship. “Know the rules, which can take half a lifetime to begin to comprehend, before you break them...” I thought. Here’s to you Mr. Schulz; I’ll look at your wobbly- lined renditions of Charlie and Lucy under a different light. I won’t just see sine-wave doodles that steadily got shakier as essential tremors progressed in your sixties to late seventies, but a craftsman who put in the countless time to master the minutia of life drawing to better form the Peanuts gang that’s transcended popular culture to this day. All while sharing this knowledge with a young student thirty years ago who I met today.