Glen Le Lievre
His drawings have appeared in Playboy, MAD, Private Eye, Punch, The Spectator, Reader’s Digest, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and Time. He’s a five-time Reuben and three-time Walkley nominee and winner of four Stanley Awards including 2016 Cartoonist of the Year. Latest drawings can be found at https://www.patreon.com/glenlelievre
-I Grew up in Melbourne Australia. Discovered Peanuts, Marvel comics and H. M. Bateman all at once when I was ten. Never really stood a chance after that.
No real role models from the screen big, small, or otherwise. Favourite artists as a kid would have to have been Ron Cobb, Charles Schulz, John Romita, Gary Larson and Gahan Wilson.
You can always study or take classes but the best learning is to never stop doing.
I think it was Charles Schulz who said: “You have a thousand bad drawings inside you, the quicker you can get them out the better.”
The goal is to find someone willing to pay you to do a thousand terrible drawings.
Started doing editorial drawings for the local newspapers, then later for the Melbourne broadsheet The Age. Single gag cartoons for The Bulletin and People. Then moved to New York and drew for Playboy, MAD and The New Yorker. Jumped back home and became a regular contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald. Now on Patreon. https://www.patreon.com/glenlelievre
My field is single gag, strip and editorial drawings, But in a comic book I loved Pat Grant and Fionn McCabe’s The Grot. https://thegrotcomic.com/
And anything at all by Ben Hutchings. www.hutcho.net
-Certainly comics affected my life. Marvel Comics, especially Spider-man, had a real impact on me as a kid because everything took place in a real location; New York. Moving there as a grown up and being able to walk the actual streets inhabited by these fictional characters was a quiet nerdy thrill for my inner ten-year-old.
-Greatest artistic achievement so far: Still being able to draw for a living. I also quite like doing GIFs, but “greatest artistic achievement” would be slightly over-egging things.
I was lucky to have squeaked out a career just as the door was slamming shut on print media. Before the money ran out altogether I was able to convince a few publishers to pay me to turn out drawings over an extended period –which is the only way you get better.
With crowdfunding you’re replacing a publisher with a few hundred random strangers who don’t edit you, so you can pretty much please yourself.
Find a gig –any gig- that pays the bills and allows you to keep drawing.
It took me decades just to get competent. If you don’t keep drawing you won’t even get that far. Really enjoying posting exclusively for my Patrons.
If –and when- I run out of road/Patrons there’s always kid’s books.
Last refuge of a scoundrel.
https://www.lelievrecartoons.com/