It’s not every day a cartoonist gets invited to draw cartoons in Iceland. Most of us sit in our studios, alone, working hard on figuring out what’s funny and how to draw it. Most of the time, that’s what I do.
But sometimes there are breaks in this routine, and cartoonists are adaptable. I was recently invited to travel to Iceland to live-draw a conference—or, more specifically, to live tweet-draw a conference, meaning sketching quickly on my iPad and tweeting the digital sketch out immediately. It’s a type of drawing I started doing a few years ago; in fact, I have live tweet-drawn for this magazine. The drawings are not cartoons in the classic New Yorker sense; they are, rather, a visual response to what I am seeing and experiencing in real time.
Contrary to what some might think, cartoonists don’t pluck ideas from overheard conversations. But we do have highly developed antennae; we pick up on stuff. We might draw or write it down; we might not. We are sponges, soaking up the world around us and squeezing it back out, hopefully in a way that provokes laughter. We work hard on each cartoon, but it shouldn’t look like we work hard.
For a few days, Iceland was my “studio,” and I drew what I saw:
