Trying to capture artist Danielle Corsetto, newly juried into the Over the Mountain Studio Tour, is like trying to capture quicksilver. She embraces the career title of "cartoonist," but her practice goes far beyond that. She has also worn the hats of illustrator, caricaturist, watercolor artist, writer, teacher, and is beginning to dip her paintbrush into gouache. But she is best known for her comics, especially online, where she started her career while still in college.
Danielle came to Shepherdstown seeking a BFA in photography, but she knew she wanted to be a cartoonist. She caught the cartooning bug when she was eight and never stopped drawing comic strips, dreaming of one day becoming syndicated in the newspapers (though she knew it was a slim chance). After graduating from Shepherd in 2004, she started a new "webcomic" - a serialized comic strip primarily shared online - called "Girls With Slingshots," just for fun. To her surprise, the comic's popularity took off, and gradually she was able to decrease the photography, illustration, and caricature gigs she'd been supporting herself with to focus on her comics full-time.
Since then she's finished Girls With Slingshots after 11 years, and published them in ten volumes and one final compendium. She spent a few years teaching college classes, writing and drawing comics for other creators, and practicing watercolor, character design, and figure drawing, as well as studying the old crooked buildings in her town (she fell in love with Shepherdstown and stayed). All of this was to prepare for her next comic, called "Elephant Town." Armed with new knowledge of everything from how to draw feet standing on the ground (something you don't have to draw in comic strips!), to how gutters attach to an old roof, she's now sharing new pages of Elephant Town online every Monday. The story is fictional, but takes place entirely in Shepherdstown.
The Elephant Town website is almost ready to launch. In the meantime, you can check out the pages she's posted on her Instagram page - www.instagram.com/dcorsetto.
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