Draw Me Anything with Brian Biggs.
Wednesday 16 September, 12pm ET, live on Substack!
I’ve been introduced at parties, more than once, as a “bloke who doodles for a living”.
Nobody does this to other professions, really. Nobody claps a surgeon on the back and says, “So, you tinker?” No one tells a pilot she “fiddles about with lil’ planes”. But hand someone a drawing you’ve spent 30 years learning how to make, and out comes the d-word.
This week’s Draw Me Anything guest wrote a whole essay about that word (It’s not “doodling”), and I’ve been nodding at it ever since.
Brian Biggs has been drawing professionally for more than 30 years: The New York Times, MoMA, Disney, hundreds of magazines-he’s made more than 80 children’s books, several of them New York Times bestsellers, which is roughly 80 more than me. He teaches illustration at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. He hosts a YouTube show in which grown adults discuss art supplies with the hushed reverence most people reserve for French wine. (Precisely my kind of lunatic, in other words.)
Right now he’s making a graphic novel called The Walk, about an astronaut alone in space who wants nothing more than to get outside, and he’s serialising the whole process (thumbnails, wrong turns, existential wobbles) on his Substack, Random Orbit. If you’ve ever wanted to watch an amazing book get built in public, plank by plank, that’s the one. (I’ve been following along instead of finishing my own book…)
So. On Wednesday we’ll draw live while I interrogate him about all of it: the process of making books, the astronauts, geek out about pens, and how a man can draw for 3 decades and still feel like he’s just getting started. Fling your requests into the chat, and we’ll draw those too. That’s the whole point of the show!
‘til then!
Your pal,
Don’t worry, Jason. When a friend was asked recently what I’m up to now, he said: “he reads books all day.” He’s not entirely wrong 😂
In one of Anders Nilsen’s more scribbly books, he responds to, “this book is awesome, but no one will buy it because the drawing is crude and off-putting at first,” with, “Crude?! Give me a break! It took me all my life to learn to draw like this!” One of my favourite things that anybody has said about art, ever.