Visiting Lecturer Tom Gauld
We were delighted to welcome our final Friday visitor of the year last week when Tom Gauld came to town.
Tom graduated from Edinburgh College of Art and went on to graduate from the Royal College of Art in 2001. He is well known within the industry for sharp humour and quirky characterization.
Tom took students through some of his professional projects, describing his relationship of 8 years with the Guardian newspaper and how he developed as a cartoonist. It was a great insight to hear about his working process and see some extracts from his sketchbook. All the professional wisdom was also interspersed with some visual storytelling to hold our attention – this demonstration of timing and how a narrative can be broken up and paced was extremely valuable!
It was fascinating to hear how he tackles the constraints of working in a confined space for his weekly cartoon, an incredibly short story is needed and the wording needs to be concise and carefully refined. He also talked about developing characters for another weekly contribution to the New York Times, a long thin composition this time presents more challenges.
It was a useful reminder to see some of Tom’s inspirations that creative minds need feeding, he showed some of the image makers, toys and the visual references he uses to forms ideas about robots and imaginary worlds, as well as discussing the literary settings that spark off his ideas.
Tom’s new book ‘You’re all just jealous of my jetpack’ is out now.
www.tomgauld.com
