Finally, a book of drawings for people who can't draw.

Ashton Bishop was born colour-blind, making his drawing skills a little under scratch. So, he created a cartoon series so people wouldn’t laugh AT his drawings, rather laugh WITH them.

A movie star, an astronaut, an artist:-that was the list of my childhood ambitions and you would have thought that the final one might have been the easiest. And from the parental praise that continued through prep and kindy I thought that was my natural calling. However, once I collated the feedback from my peers there was a general consensus that my colour-blindness was only matched by my visual ineptness to make realistic depictions in my drawings.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an ‘Oprah-esque’ story of overcoming the odds and mastering drawing for glory; instead I quit and took up soccer.

Fast-forward 20 years and I’m suddenly found smart enough to get into law school, yet still dumb enough to do it. So to avoid reading Mabo, Donoghue vs Stevenson’s and the other 1000s of legal cases I should have been reading, I started to doodle again. But, unfortunately, I still had the artistic abilities of a 6 year old.

Science has proven that the less detail there is in a cartoon, generally the more relatable they are, and hence out of all the scribbles and sketches there was something very special about Eric the Circle. No matter whom I showed him to – they liked him. That was the good bit.

Do you want to see Eric the Circle’s Story? It’s very cute. (Post continues after gallery.)

The bad bit was when I tried to get Eric published as a ‘proper author’. The feedback was always the same, “yeah, that’s ok, but what about this one? You should do one about ‘x’”. It would happen without exception. Whenever I showed people, they thought mine were ‘ok’, but loved their own Eric’s – quite the conundrum for a 20 something aspiring artist.

So after my artistic ego got in the way for over a decade, I finally parked it at the door and Eric the Circle transformed into the World’s First Draw-it-Yourself cartoon.

With his very own online draw-pad and website, literally anybody could create their own Eric cartoon and many people did. In fact, we put up 100 cartoons as inspiration and at last check our global community have created over 21,000 unique Eric the Circle cartoons. The LOVE for Eric have made him (we think) the most prolific cartoon in history.

The cartoons from a host of creators have now been pulled together into a best of book. The theme of the very first Eric the Circle book of course is LOVE…if you’d like to embrace that love, click here to buy your own copy.

Or for the people who ‘can’t draw’, ‘aren’t funny’ or will never be published, Eric the Circle might just be your artistic salvation. We believe everybody has at least one good joke, one good quote and one good Eric in them. And we believe that they should be published online, and in print and with good spirit.

Instead of laughing AT Eric the Circle and my drawings, laughing WITH them.

Either buy the book here or jump online and join the 1000s of creators worldwide who have discovered that with Eric the Circle they can.

Ashton Bishop
The original Eric the Circle creator.

What do you think of Eric the Circle? Are you much of a drawer?

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