Tom Gauld.
Bio: I make a weekly cartoon for The Guardian newspaper about books and a weekly science cartoon for New Scientist magazine. I work as an illustrator and have written a number of comic books and, most recently, a children’s book called The Little Wooden Robot and the Log Princess. I’ve drawn ten covers for The New Yorker and a number of illustrations, but never a cartoon: which is something that I hope to remedy sooner or later.
Read more about the cover here!
I think this Spring Music cover may be my favourite. I can’t read music, so I worked with a fact-checker from The New Yorker called Fergus, who understood music, to make sure the notation was correct, and all related to spring. We had to use pre-1930 music, because even publishing these tiny excerpts from modern tunes would have cost too much.
Where I sit to draw when I get tired or bored of standing. and where I work on the computer.
Tools: L-R: Uniball Eye Micro Ballpen, Pentel Micro-correct Whiteout, Pilot G-tec-C4 (for thin lines), UniBall Air (for thicker lines), Bicmatic Pencil, Eraser, Ruler.
Tools of choice: My favourite drawing tool is a ballpen: the Uniball Eye micro, which gives a lovely smooth line and has very good ink. I love to draw in Maruman Art-Spiral Sketchbooks. For me, the sketchbook is the most important part of my process. It’s a great place to play around with ideas, and look at them in different ways, without feeling anything is fixed. I try to spend as much time as I can doodling and making notes in my sketchbook, because once I move onto drawing on paper or using the computer, things seem to be on a specific path to completion. Which is necessary in the end, but only once the exploring and playing has got to somewhere interesting.
A pretty typical sketchbook page.
I also use a couple of other ballpens (one a bit thicker and one very thin), and a Pentel Micro-Correct whiteout pen. I draw all my pencils and roughs with Bicmatic pencils, then trace them in ink using my big light box (shown in the photos). I then scan them into the computer and use photoshop to do the colouring.
Lightbox:I stand at this to do most of my drawings.
Tool I wish I could use better: I’m quite colorblind in the red-green area so colours have always been difficult for me. Photoshop is really useful because you can try all sorts of things, then just undo them if they don’t work, plus I can read the CMYK numbers to figure out what the colour is mathematically, even if I can’t tell visually. But it’s still a bit of a struggle. So I suppose the tool I’d like to be able to use better would be all the colour tools analogue and digital. It would be nice to add colour to my ink drawings with watercolour.
I sit in this to think while doodling in my sketchbook.
Tool I wish existed: A paintbrush with an undo setting.
Tricks: A few years ago, really just out of interest, I made a font of my hand-lettering using a free online service. It turned out to be really useful for making rough versions of my comics and is much easier to edit than rewriting by hand. I don’t use it for finished art because it lacks a truly handmade feel, but it’s great for speedily working things out.
Misc: When I started making cartoons, I didn’t understand scanning or resolution at all, and saved all my art as atrociously low resolution files. If I ever want to reprint any of that stuff, I’ll have to find the drawings and rescan it all. Now I do the opposite: I save everything at super high resolution just in case I ever want to print it bigger.
Website, etc.