Dirk van Dulmen: Storytelling in a Single Image

The drawings in this post are all done by my friend Dirk van Dulmen, who is an amazing story-artist. His specialty is humor: he is a very funny guy, who is almost obsessed with trying to find a joke in any situation. (I'm not kidding, even when you are just having a regular conversation he will constantly be giggling and riffing on stuff you say.) 

So a few months ago I was looking at his work, especially some gag drawings he did years ago, and I noticed how solid the storytelling in these images was. A gag-drawing, in case you're not familiar with the term, is a little sketch that captures a funny beat or moment, almost like a joke. It is a lot like a New Yorker-style cartoon, one single image (occasionally there might be series of drawings if the gag is sequential) that perfectly captures a moment. Sometimes there might be a line underneath but more often the joke is visual in nature. 

Dirk's drawing at the top of this post is a good example of a gag-sketch. The gag is simple, the man is too short to reach the urinals, but the way he stands there tapping his foot tells us something about this character and about how he feels at this particular moment.    

So I was looking at the drawing pictured above of a baby crocodile in a birds-nest, when I noticed how much story there is going on in this one little sketch. Clearly the little croc just came out of its egg. The nest is in a tree and there are chicks there, so it is not where he's supposed to be. The crocodile is happy and kinda cute, unaware that something is wrong here. But the chicks are clearly afraid of him, they have moved away as far as they can and seem to seek comfort with each other.

So I know where we are, I know what just happened, I can tell who is the main character (the baby croc) and I can tell a little bit about his character, I can also see how the world is reacting to him. Not too bad for just one drawing, I'd say!

When I asked him about this drawing, and about how he approaches storytelling in a single drawing in general, Dirk had some very solid advice. He told me that when you want to tell a story in one image you usually have three things: there's an action, there's a reaction and there's a location. Het told me that usually the emotional message is located in either the action or the reaction and you want to make sure that this message lands with the audience. So you will use all your tools: composition, value, contrast -to make sure that your audience gets the point of your story.

It may sound simple, but I found Dirk's analysis of storytelling in a single image very helpful. Have look at some more of Dirk's great gag drawings below: