Voices that Inspire

What inspires you from WFSU Public Media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. My name is Nathan Orcher. I am the communications director for the Florida Center for Reading Research. I'm also an editorial cartoonist for the Tallahassee Democrat. And I'm the Florida Chair for the National Cartoonist Society. I feel like I've been a cartoonist my entire life. I think a lot of kids are naturally. You just pick up a pencil and start doodling and boom, your cartoonist. It's problem solving. I find it to be really challenging and really creative at the same time. Where you try and take this idea and distill it down to its most simple image. Finding that balance between what can grab the reader with the visual and then kind of hammer home an idea with the text when people say, oh, I could never draw, I could never do that. It's like, sure you can. It's a skill, just like anything else in the world. It's just time and practice, time and practice. And you can do anything. Oh, I'm inspired by everything. Obviously, the work of my peers and my colleagues, that inspires me all the time. I'm a coca-arts mentor at raw and working with my mentee over the last two years has been awesome. He's an inspiration. It's really exciting to see the next generation of artists come up. I just think it's really important to share my knowledge and my love and my passion with the next generation. So I like to do workshops anytime I can where we make many comics with kids. And drawing a comic or a cartoon is a pretty big undertaking. So giving them a really quick, short assignment that they can actually complete within 30 minutes to an hour, it really emboldens them to go do more. My name is Nathan Archer. I am the communications director for the Florida Center for Reading Research. I'm also the editorial cartoonist for the telehazzy Democrat. You're listening to voices that inspire.