It’s a frustrating experience for me that I love visual art, but can’t actually produce anything decent of my own. Words, I can do. But ask me to draw you a picture of a horse, and it will doubtless end up looking like something totally unrelated, like a teapot. Or a mouse. Or a 1970s Triumph Dolomite.

For a long time, I’ve pondered about learning the art of cartooning. It would certainly come in handy. Even writing long-form comedy such as sitcoms can produce material that can be useful in other forms, such as cartoon strips. And I often have disjointed ideas that don’t exist as part of a larger project that I would love to slot in somewhere without having to shoe-horn it into other work.

So – I’m learning how to draw cartoon characters with the aid of a superb book by Christopher Hart entitled ‘Modern Cartooning’. It takes you through different techniques step-by-step, so that by the end of the book, you are equipped with enough knowledge to draw cartoon characters with confidence – from developing appropriate facial expressions, to getting the body type right, and most importantly making everything as funny as it can be.

This type of step-by-step book suits my learning style perfectly. I wrote Spectrum games as a teenager using one, as well as HTML back when roll-over images were the height of sophistication.

So, having bought a sketch pad and some artists pens and pencils, I sat down to learn how to draw. Which is when I realised how technology really can help make things much easier. Because a couple of weeks earlier, I’d downloaded an app onto my iPad called ‘Adobe Ideas’, which is a drawing program. It was fun to use, but I dismissed it after a while because it was too difficult to draw with any kind of accuracy. That was a massive error of judgement.

Because after a while sketching out my cartoons with old-fashioned paper and pencils, I realised that drawing is a very messy business. Instead of a clean-looking cartoon face, I’d be producing a face, yes, but a face covered with the scars of rubbed-out lines and smudged graphite. It’s the sort of thing you don’t see much of on ‘The Simpsons’.

So I began to think: what if, once I’d finished a cartoon, I could upload a copy of it to this app, which I could then use to clean up the image. I could even colour in areas of the drawing without having to resort to felt tip pens (which I always thought looked crap at school, because you could see all the pen strokes, as well as where the pen had started to run out, which made it look rubbish.)

And happily, it turned out that I can indeed do just that. In fact, I can do more. Because Adobe Ideas lets you import an image and keep it on a separate layer, so you can trace over that image from scratch – meaning that you can produce variations of the same drawing – very handy if you want to produce the same character with different expressions in three panes of a cartoon strip. Cheating? Nah. It’s called using the resources available to you. So all I have to do is take a photo of my drawing with my iPad, and then upload it to the app to then alter. Easy!

Now let me reassure you that I don’t suddenly believe I’m an artist. But what I can now do is produce drawings that are good enough to back up my writing – that I could either use as end products in themselves, or as ways of supporting the presentation of my ideas.

See what you think. The character is my own creation and is the first of two that illustrate a set-up/punchline gag. The first picture is the real sketch, and the second is the final result made on Adobe Ideas. I think it works really well!