About this ebook
Watercolor artist Dick Zunkel has experimented with single-panel and three-panel cartoons for years. The ideas were forthcoming, but the process was messy and difficult. After spilling more than one bottle of india ink and chronically stabbing his hand with an Exacto knife, and having only published a few cartoons in limited distribution magazines, he gave up... until November of 2015. Sitting in an art workshop and staring at the ceiling with no project in mind, he pulled out a brush-pen (introduced to him by artist Uma Kelkar) and drew a simple cartoon of a plein air artist painting a light at the end of the tunnel, a train. He scanned the drawing, imported it into to a scaleable vector graphics editor, Inkscape, and drew a square around the image. It was the first of a series he named Plain Air. In 2018 he published his first ebook Plain Air, with a narrative about creativity and process. Realizing people would rather look at pictures in a larger format he published "Breathing Plain Air" a collection of over 130 full page color cartoons without the narrative. He continues to draw art related cartoons and is working on getting broad distibution of the paper versions of the book.
ss11-23-2020