Studio Habits: Clearing Physical Space to Make Way for Mental Space.

The curious, deceptively simple mise en place ritual of several longtime professional cartoonists.

One windy weekend in 2022, I was wandering around the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus with fellow cartoonist Maria Scrivan. We were fresh off the behind-the-scenes tour of the archives, shamelessly drooling over the original artwork on display by Charles Schulz. The wide-ranging exhibition celebrated what would have been “Sparky”’s 100th birthday. A photo of his pristine, minimalist studio caught my eye, and I noted to Maria how clean it looked. “Oof. He makes my studio look like something out of an episode of Hoarders.”

Sparky’s Studio

My creative process looks less like a workflow and more like a crime scene.

I barricade myself in the studio, turn off my phone, and my studio transforms from "moderately organized workspace" to "what if a tornado hit an art supply store?" I disappear into the work like a monk with ADHD and access to too many pens. Only when I've wrestled the thing into submission and the project is complete do I restore order. I emerge, blinking into the sunlight like a cave dweller, because the line between "creative genius" and "actual madness" is apparently just basic housekeeping.

This is what my studio looked like while I was working on a recent piece for the New Yorker…

Immediately after I emailed the Cartoon Editor with the finished artwork, I packed up my studio, and it once again looked like this. Bordering on Dexter-level forensic cleaning.

As I hunched over and continued to gawk at Sparky’s studio in awe, Maria said,

“My studio is a total mess while I’m working: It looks like a bomb hit it. But whenever I finish a project, I absolutely have to pack everything away as a sort of ritual, to exorcise the work from my brain.”

I stopped in my tracks…

This is the third time in a month I have independently heard the exact same thing from other professional cartoonists: Tom Richmond, the brilliant illustrator and caricaturist behind many of the movie parodies in MAD, had just told me the exact same thing when we were at that year’s National Cartoonists Society Reuben Awards in Kansas City.

It was almost identical:
He sits down to work on a project and allows himself to kind of explode pens, brushes, ink, paper, and scraps of reference images all over his space, and it looks like a disaster zone after a hurricane.

By the way, this is a man for whom I have an all-consuming case of studio envy. He is the most organized cartoonist I know, so it surprised me to learn that he allowed himself to create a mess to bury himself in the zone.

Click to watch the video.

Then, when he sends off the final art to the Editor/Art Director, he takes his time in a personal ritual he’s had for years, where he goes around the studio and packs everything away, puts trash in the bin, stores his pens, ink, brushes — whatever he used in the process of creation — in their places. Then — and ONLY then — can he move on to the next thing in his day.

The other cartoonist I had a conversation with was Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist behind Doonesbury for the past 55 years. He’d shared a photo of his studio, post-clean-up. I said I was so envious of his pristine setup because my studio at the time looked like the entire room sneezed.

He said,

“I’ve long had this odd, celebratory habit — right after I make a deadline, I pick up my studio, ready it for the next one.”