learning and doing

When I was young it was easy to find out how use hand tools. During World War II the military produced basic guides for servicemen that explained all. Right after the war they were available at little cost. The ones that came into our house had been published by the Navy. I still remember using one of these manuals to learn exactly how to splice electrical wires together. It helped that I liked to learn about things from books. There were quite a few skills that had greater fascination for me on paper than in real life. Fly fishing for example. I learned the subject from books and even acquired the equipment, but never got into the sport at all. Archery too.

And cartooning. I devoured comic books and was interested in drawing cartoons, but not interested enough to get beyond reading about how it's done.

Here is one old military how-to pamphlet which didn't come my way back then. It showed up in a blog post I read this morning.


It was scanned and posted online by the Animation Archive of the International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood, which has the nice logo at right. About themselves, they say: "The Animation Archive is a project of International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood, a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization. We are building a museum, library and digital archive for the benefit of animation professionals, cartoonists, designers, students and the general public. Our database of images, biographic info and films contains thousands of entries- animated cartoons, artwork, and filmographies. Contributions and volunteers are needed to make the dream a reality."

If you do a bit of searching on the topic, you'll come up with this near relative from the same time period:
And now for something completely different- Pocket Cartoon Course!