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CITIZEN

JERMS LANNINGHAM Drawing out the citizen drawer TARA MORGAN

How long have you been illustrating for Citizen? I think it started in 2006, I could be wrong. I’ve done so many of them; it’s just been a whirlwind ... I started with spot illustrations and then moved into Citizen Boise. Had you illustrated from photographs before drawing Citizen? In high school we did it a little bit; our art teacher would make us draw National Geographic things. And then there was this group of us in the back … some of us were drawing skulls and people with their heads cut off … We were the kids who probably weren’t going to succeed in life. But all those people I know that sat in that back area, they’re still creative ... Some of them own huge, fancy design ﬁrms. Describe your illustration style. I don’t think I’m all that terribly good at drawing people. I just draw them and then spin it enough until I think that they’re cool and sketchy and fun … I do them really fast, and if I don’t like them, I’ll do them really fast again … Drawing people realistically really isn’t my style, but it’s kind of become that. You keep your licks, so to speak … Garﬁeld, back in the day, he was this really chubby cat, then he kinda got skinny and

| DECEMBER 16–22, 2009 | BOISEweekly

then his head stayed big. So, I looked back through all my drawings—there was like 80 of them—and the style has changed a little bit. What’s your process like, how do you tackle the photos? I print it out on the printer and make them big or small. Then I put them on a light table and I blue line them out a little bit … Back in the day, if someone had a bigger nose or bigger ears or you wanted to accentuate a feature, you could do that. You try to make them as cool-looking as possible—not too old—and if it’s a gal, you wanna make her look pretty. You don’t want to mess with people’s teeth. It’s a fine line because the very first one that I did was Margaret at Hollywood Market, and I drew her in my more caricature style. I guess some people got really torqued. She kind of has these little jowls, because she’s older, that hang down—laugh lines and jowls. I just made her look kind of pissed and grumpy—she kind of is—so I added some character to her. [BW art director Leila Ramella-Rader] was like, “You can’t draw ladies like that anymore.” What are some of the more difficult aspects of drawing people? I think I have trouble doing people’s eyes and their laugh lines and their crow’s feet … sometimes people have big foreheads and you wanna fix stuff when you’re drawing because we want things to look pretty. There’s some people that just aren’t all that pretty, but you have to draw them how they are. Some people have big noses, some people have big ears. So when you finish with some of these pieces, you’re just like, “That’s just how they are.”

JER EM Y LANNINGHAM

Jeremy “Jerms” Lanningham is a straightup nice dude. A graphic designer, illustrator, gallery curator, skateboarder, husband and father of two little girls, Lanningham leads a packed life. And for the last few years, he’s illustrated every Citizen that has graced the pages of Boise Weekly. This week, we decided to pull a Charlie Kaufman and turn the spotlight on him. What’s the story of the citizen behind the Citizen illustrations?

That’s a hard line to walk: making sure that you make people look their best while staying truthful to their actual attributes … A lot of it depends on the photo, also. If the lighting is horrible and they’re wearing a hat, you can’t really see their eyes, you have to put shadows in. Different ethnicities—if someone’s African American or Hispanic or Native American—in a little black and white drawing, how do you do that? More hatch marks? But hatch marks make someone look old and then you have to accentuate the eyes a little bit more. It seems like a lot of times you get to know just as much about the person by looking at your drawing as you do by reading the text. Completely. It stops people and gets people’s attention, the way it’s placed on the page … So many people who have been interviewed do some really cool and moving things for people or the world in general or the environment … I’m just the guy that draws them. How are you going to tackle your own Citizen drawing? I might have my daughter Maya do it with a crayon. A big circle with ears … That might set her up for a similar life. More Jerms at boiseweekly.com.