Illustration, like any Olympic sport or professional-eating contest, requires one to warm-up before they can achieve peak performance. The warm-up phase can be painful— your brain is all slippery and can’t recall the details you need for Peak Draw. Like, how a foot looks. Or all that weird stuff in the ear. Or whether heads face front or back. To get through this drawing purgatory, I try and turn it into a puzzle or a game. Like, I’ll work in another style until my natural one takes over. Or I’ll make a bunch of scribbles and try and draw what I see inside. Or I’ll take a character and age them by about a thousand years. So last week, when my buddy Stan showed me a font he designed— Chonk—it gave me the idea for a fun new warm-up game.
Siblings And Rivals
In the world of graphic design, there’s an interesting overlap in the roles of fonts and illustration. Both are fully encouraged to be impressive and jaw-dropping works of art, but if they’re not supporting the text, they’re kind of a failure. They must serve and support the message of the text, lest the reader grow confused and go elsewhere to experience the sweet natural high of not feeling stupid. So when designing stuff that communicates, be it comic or book cover or any sort of packaging, the text usually comes first, then the illustration and then the font. I’d never done it the other way around—having to match the text to the font, and then do the illustration last. I thought it might be fun.
To begin, I set the text in phrases that felt right for the font. Phrases like so…
And then I drew a visual to match the text:
Then I congratulated myself on a job well done!
Then I showed Kim!
Who pointed out, in the loving yet deflatingly-honest voice of a longtime spouse, that the drawings actually didn’t match the font that well. After reinflating, I agreed. See, I was echoing Chonk’s fun and cheeky attitude, but I wasn’t really mimicking its clean lines and the quick stibby-stabs of its stems and counters. So I decided to rework my favorite illustration— the Engine 41 drawing—and ended up here:
I was quite pleased with the result. Especially that little scene with the dalmation. He’s so clearly tired of the fun.
Go Forth And Follow!
I urge you, gentle voyeurs who break into my diary on a regular basis, try this little exercise yourselves! I’d recommend it to anyone looking to get into illustration, for sure. I find, more often than not, that where most burgeoning illustrators fall short is working with typography. And hey—if you like the cut of Chonk’s jib, get a version of your own! Stan loves fonts, and puts a lot of work into their quality construction. It’s really important to support that sort of thing, before A.I. makes the craft obsolete.
Oh— A.I. is my neighbor, Dr. A.I. Peepwhistle. He’s working on a new alphabet. Some of the letters are okay. Some are… upsetting.
I’ve been talking with a lot of friends about the importance of play in art lately, so this exercise really resonates with me. Also I loved this… “in the loving yet deflatingly-honest voice of a longtime spouse”. I felt this on both sides 😂 Bravo for giving it another stab!
C H O N K