[bright music]
Hi, my name’s Will McPhail,
and this is how to draw vermin.
[light jazz music]
You were raised in England and now live in Scotland,
but your vermin feel very New York to me.
I don’t know if they’re more prevalent in New York or not
but they’re definitely more sort of tolerated in New York.
You studied zoology?
Yeah, I did do zoology, I studied zoology in Glasgow
before I started doing cartoons.
What was your plan with your zoology degree?
Not to sound like Mother, here.
You ask a 17-year-old what they wanna do
for the rest of their life, [laughs]
and they always make a perfect, logical decision.
I liked animals, and I wanted to sort of, uh, yeah,
I don’t know, I wanted to spend 30 grand on something,
and they seemed like a good bet.
I actually, making a concerted effort
to draw more animals now,
to sort of, in retrospect, my degree’s more worthwhile,
if you know what I mean. [both laughing]
So I can go, See? Rats!
It was worth it, it was all worth it!
[relaxed jazz music]
This is a cartoon of a man dressed in only a cape
made out of pigeon feathers, I think,
tighty-whities, he’s got a pigeon on his head,
he’s covered in pigeons.
He’s in a very sort of tidy-looking front room
with what appear to be his parents sat on the couch.
And he’s saying, The Pigeon King grows tired
of your career advice, Mother.
[laughs] So tell me a little bit about these characters.
There’s no pretense there, it’s essentially me.
I think when I did it I was living at home
with my mom at the time,
and she has got a very worthwhile,
sort of cosmically important job.
And I have got, [laughs] I’ve got this.
She’s never actually tried to give me career advice,
and I don’t speak about myself in the third person.
Not the third person part that would be weird,
it would be the title, I think.
Oh no, [laughs] I did call myself the Pigeon King.
Did he spring into your consciousness
sort of like fully formed and fully dressed in this outfit,
or did it sort of build up as you drew?
I thought, I’ll do a guy who’s the Pigeon King,
and then just let it happen as I was drawing it.
Those sort of side jokes, like his cape
and his tighty-whities and his slippers,
I leave them until the drawing process.
Do you have any sort of tips or tricks
for drawing pigeons?
I guess I’ve got a little bit of zoological
knowledge about the kind of, you know,
leg joints and things like that.
I know what their sort of vague skeleton looks like.
Not that I think about pigeon skeletons. [laughs]
Yeah, I was like… [laughs]
[light jazz music]
[Will] I usually like to start with the eyes.
All pigeons have got this weird little mustache thing
that it’s just above their beak.
Nobody knows what it’s for.
When I say scientists are baffled,
I mean, they are wandering around,
they are screwing up little pieces of paper
and throwing it behind ’em.
Narrow it out just where the neck meets the body here,
and it always looks kind of demonic,
so I’ll maybe give him a proper expression now.
I like to sort of bring up the lids
from the bottom of the eyes there,
’cause it makes ’em look panicked,
panicked and afraid, that’s what most pigeons are.
A little wing as if he’s just sort of welcoming you
into his [laughs] horrible world, and that’s the first guy!
Okay, let’s do another one from a different position.
We’re starting with the eye again.
Now here’s the mustache again, just side view this time,
still there, a cruel little beak,
that’s still there, all the hits.
I usually like to put the mouth
just sort of underneath that mustache.
The rest of the body now.
Now when I’m drawing pigeons’ feet,
it’s a gnarled mess of growths and deformity.
You want your stomach to turn when you see them.
That’s the goal there.
He’s pigeon-toed.
That is a joke I wish I hadn’t made.
Let’s have him looking sort of manic, there we are.
Just like he’s had a horrible day.
Like I was saying about the skeleton, here’s the cool bit,
that all birds have got these hidden,
secretive little dinosaur legs
with four joints down to the toe.
If you can sort of master those,
then you’ll always get the posture right,
because all birds have ’em.
So let’s draw a penguin here.
Same thing, even here,
the hidden little dinosaur legs, if you can believe it.
So spare a thought for penguins,
because they are walking around
constantly in a crouched position.
Stretch your legs out, guys!
[playful music]
This is a scene set behind
the mouse’s hole in the skirting board.
There is a mouse sat in front
of a theater-style vanity mirror,
and to her right, you’re looking out through the hole
into the room and seeing a pair of human legs.
And the mouse is saying, Showtime.
Who, either in the mouse or human world
has inspired this particular cartoon character?
I wanted it to look like a sort of a jaded
Broadway actor who’s been sort of on
maybe a long run for a long time, [chuckles]
at least partway through a run,
and it’s like it’s going down a storm,
just confident and just about to kill it
in whatever performance she’s about to do out there.
Your characters have these very expressive, elastic faces,
which is part of your unique style.
Yeah, oh, it definitely developed over time.
Even from the Pigeon King cartoon to that one,
you can see that the eyes are very different.
I really love drawing those expressive faces,
so the more and more I sort of grew to love cartooning,
the more effort I put on finding that perfect eye shape.
I love the minute changes that you can make
to an eyebrow or a mouth that changes
the emotion that they’re trying to convey.
[light jazz music]
Okay, so I thought I would show you
how I draw my facial expressions.
So I’ve got a bunch of blank faces here
and I’ve picked out some emotions that I might feel
just throughout the course of a normal day.
So my eyes are just a pretty plain circle.
If you put the eyebrows at different levels like that,
it always gives a sense of confusion.
And we’ll just have her peering off.
Now that’s just grossed out there,
but if I can manage to just give a sense
of levity to the mouth here,
then we should be able to bring it home!
Next one is lonely, but also horny.
Okay, start with the eyes on this gentleman.
If you can just get that sort of upward flick
at the end of the eyebrow coming in towards the nose,
then you automatically feel sorry for the guy.
Bring those eyelids up,
always gives you a nice sense of desperation.
He has been in lockdown for months.
The feeling of human touch is a mere memory to him.
And I think just to drive this home and seal the deal here,
I think I’ll have him biting his lip.
Just a ball of tension.
Next is tired, but also vengeful.
Tiredness is always the easiest to get across in the eyes.
So I’ll focus on that up here, some heavy lids,
and just half a pupil, ’cause it’s covered by her lids.
Now she’s just tired here,
but if I can just give her a knowing smile here,
that just makes it look like she’s thinking
how she will exact her revenge.
Boom, there it is. What’s she planning?
[cheerful music]
This cartoon shows a New York subway platform,
and it shows a wave of rats
coming down the train track,
carrying a whole bunch of passengers.
The caption reads, Due to a power loss,
the train will be replaced by a wave of rats.
I love this cartoon.
One of my favorite things about it is that everyone
is still just sort of glued to their phones,
except for maybe the woman with an enormous bun
who seems to have seen what’s happening
and is not reacting at all. [laughs]
No, yeah, she’s reacting like she’s just seen
the train come in and it’s like, okay.
I was going for that total tolerance of rats thing
where it just isn’t weird.
I could have drawn it either end of the scale where
everybody’s terrified and screaming and panicked,
or the complete opposite, which is this.
And I think this is the funnier one, where nobody cares.
Yeah, well, I like that it’s sort of like
the one weird thing is the wave of rats,
but everything else is absolutely
as it would be. [both laughing]
Yeah, nothing’s changed,
even the postures of the people sitting in the rats.
How do you even begin to draw a wave of rats? [laughs]
That’s what we’re all here to find out.
So you want to draw a wave of rats.
I drew a sort of a vague shape
that was just like a mass of stuff coming in,
and then obviously as you get closer
to the foreground of the image,
I’ve got to start drawing actual rats.
It’s a gauge of how much you enjoy drawing rats,
which I guess is a lot for me.
[light acoustic music]
Okay, so I’m gonna draw some rodents,
starting with your friend and mine,
he’s never more than six feet away from you,
give him a warm round of applause, a rat!
All right, moving down into the body.
Rats have got this strange leaning posture
because they’ve got, I’m not being mean,
they’ve got a hunchback, they just have.
One of the most noticeable thing about rats
is that they famously have these heinous
little grandma hands that they clasp together
as if they’re hatching some evil plan.
When you draw in rats’ feet, they are horribly long.
That’s the trick there, just keep going.
And then of course give him his tail.
Little bite out of the ear, who knows how that happened.
And I think we’ll make him look sickly,
like he’s got food poisoning or something,
he ate something weird.
And there we go, that’s rat number one.
Okay, I think I’ll draw
New York’s most famous rodent,
Pizza Rat, because everybody loves him,
despite the fact that nobody helped him, by the way.
That’s the sort of rough look of his head.
I think I’m gonna draw him
in the dragging-up-the-stairs position.
We’ll just draw his prize,
we’ll just give him a classic pepperoni, not my favorite.
Hawaiian, thanks for asking.
Okay, what facial expression should we go for here?
You can’t go wrong with panic,
a little bit of shame in there,
and that’s two rats down, okay!
We’ll try and draw a mouse now.
I think I’d make it just more of a sort of rounded,
cuter, a little ball of fluff.
It’s a bit of a Stuart Little vibe,
which I’m not thrilled about, but you get the idea.
I’m gonna make his body much smaller
in comparison to the rats.
And there are those grandma hands.
Look at him, sitting in a sort of a Zen position.
You can give him a nice tail, maybe have it wrap around him.
Okay, what expression should we give him?
I think have him look wary.
And there we are, there’s your rodents!
Just like the ones from your nightmares.
[light acoustic music]
