You’ve seen me write in this space about the proposed legislation that would radically alter copyright law in a way that would be a disaster for creative professionals. Congress was scheduled to adjourn this session yesterday and it looks like the bill did not make it out of committee. That’s good.

What’s bad is there are still some legislators set on getting this thing passed. I cannot see a single benefit for anyone except companies and publishers that formerly had to buy the rights to use illustrations, photos, books or other creative works and can now use them for free if they cannot find the copyright owners. The language of the bill is such that the onus is on the copyright holder to catch them and prove they didn’t try hard enough to find them. As it is now the bill is literally a license to steal.

Here is the latest update from the Illustrators Partnership:

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS

First the good news: The Copyright Modernization Act (aka Orphan Works Act) appears to be dead for this year. For the third time in as many weeks the bill failed to make it out of mark-up today, and in two days Congress adjourns for this session.

Now the bad news: Lamar Smith seems committed to this awful bill and has promised to bring it back next year.

And a caveat: Congress returns after elections for a “lame-duck” session, so the bill could still be attached to some other unrelated bill and passed into law without discussion. Don’t breathe too easily until this Congress is adjourned for good.

Although there’s little reason to break out the champagne over this development, the illustration community should take great satisfaction from the knowledge that your unprecedented efforts have brought sufficient scrutiny to this bill to have stalled it so far. Remember that in March, the bill’s sponsors warned us that it would be law by now and that any group that opposed it would be “ignored” and “left behind.” It hasn’t worked out that way.

Because of your efforts – and those of our allies, the photographers, textile designers, greeting card manufacturers and others – Orphan Works legislation has now been exposed as a Trojan Horse for those who want to see a radical change in copyright law. We need to stay vigilant and we must expect that when the bill comes back (in whatever form) its sponsors will be prepared for principled opposition. They’ll plan their strategy accordingly, and we should be ready to renew our campaign all over again.

In the meantime, thanks to all of you for a united effort – you did a fantastic job. We’ll pass along more information when we learn more.

— Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner,
for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership
_______________________________________________

Creative professionals need to continue to let their congressional representatives know they oppose this bill, and it needs to be discarded or the language greatly changed to protect the rights of intellectual copyright holders. Stockhouses and other issues have already taken huge bites out of the livelihood of photographers and illustrators… this bill would turn the entire internet into one big free stockhouse. It’s that serious. Contact your local representatives and let them know it’s not a workable solution.

Click here for up-to-date links and information

As I wrote last week, Saturday the 23rd was The Lovely Anna and my 18 year wedding anniversary. We had a lovely dinner in an excellent french restaurant in Minneapolis… it’s nice to be married to someone who’s company is still the best thing about any day. We exchanged gifts as well, of course. In the last 18 years, I’ve given her diamonds, furniture, collectors statues, trips and more diamonds… I try to spoil her. Still no matter what I come up with or how much it might cost I will never be able to top the present she got for me for our 10 year anniversary. On every anniversary since, I remember the surprise like it was yesterday. In the years since I’ve come to understand how incredibly rare that gift is, beyond even the obvious uniqueness of it. I’m talking about this original caricature of me by the great Mort Drucker:

Here’s the amazing story which gives people a little insight as to what Anna is all about:

I went to the National Caricaturist Network convention in February of 1998 specifically to meet the scheduled guest speaker, Mort Drucker. This was several years before I began drawing for MAD, and I had just started getting reasonably steady freelance work for small publications and clients. Mort is one of my all time heroes, and getting a chance to meet him was something I was not going to pass up. Unfortunately Mort was unable to make the convention at the last minute due to a family member’s health problems, and I did not get that chance. I was disappointed, but he had videotaped a presentation complete with a tour of his studio with NCN member Debbie Schafer. Debbie was a friend of Mort and Barbara‘s, and she was instrumental in getting him as a speaker, securing a number of his originals to auction off at the convention and arranging a telephone Q&A with him live and the event. I asked him a question during that teleconference, but to this day I do not remember what I asked… I was incredibly nervous speaking with him. I was able to talk with Debbie quite a bit at the convention, and she could see how much admiration I had for Mort. When the weekend was over, I came home with one of Mort’s business cards complete with his phone number, courtesy of Debbie. I placed the card in my rolodex. I would never call him, of course. That’s just not the kind of thing I would do. Just having his card and number were enough… I thought that was pretty cool. I went back to real life.

The rest of the story I only found out after I got the artwork on our anniversary, but I’ll tell it in the order of events. My wife, it turns out, had no problem calling the Druckers. She copied the number and called Mort’s studio. Mort’s wife Barbara answered the phone. Barbara is a terrific lady and very protective of Mort, as she should be. She’s his business manager, negotiator and, if necessary, his “heavy”. She does a lot of the dirty work with clients and parties calling to commission work from Mort. Barbara quickly became a hero for Anna in the same way Mort is a hero for me. She asked Barbara if she could commission Mort to draw a caricature of me for our anniversary, offering a sum she thought was a lot but was actually a pittance relative to Mort’s status. Barbara was very nice but quite clear that Mort does not do personal commissions at any price. She suggested that Anna look at buying some of Mort’s originals. Anna told her I already had some of Mort’s MAD original art, but that if that’s what was available, she’d look at it. She told Barbara how much Mort’s career and work had influenced me, and how I would appreciate such a caricature of myself by him more than almost anyone on the planet. She told her about my career, such as it was at that point, and my ambitions, and that is was our 10 year anniversary. Barbara told her that year was she and Mort’s 40th anniversary, and I think she saw a kindred spirit in Anna. She told Anna to send some pictures of me and she’d show them to Mort… no promises, though.

Anna sent them to her, and a few days later Barbara called her. Barbara said Mort had agreed to do a rough pencil sketch to send for review. No revisions, she said. If Anna didn’t like the sketch, they’d just go back to looking at some of Mort’s MAD originals instead. She had the sketch mailed to our neighbor’s house. Anna got it and it was of course brilliant. Barbara told her Mort would do a final in black and white ink with perhaps a little bit of wash. Anna was thrilled and could not thank her enough. A week or so later Barbara called again and said Mort had decided to add “a little color” to the art and wanted to know if that was all right. Anna was very excited and said whatever Mort wanted to do was fine with her. The final art arrived at the neighbor’s a few weeks later. Anna got it and hid it in the closet for over a month before she gave it to me. I walked past that closet several hundred times with no idea of the treasure inside… I’m a little dense.

Anna didn’t just give me the drawing. Oh, no. Months before she had sent out pictures of me along with an 8 x 12 piece of drawing paper to a number of my artist friends and colleagues as well as my family asking for caricatures of me as a surprise. She received them on the sly, some terrific ones from artists I’d worked with and some done with love but not much skill from my family members. She assembled these in a big album. On our anniversary, she presented me with the album full of caricatures of me. It was great and I had a blast going through it. It was so touching that so many people took the time to draw me… I thought it was a unique and special gift. I had no idea what was still coming.

The moment I got the Drucker is still very vivid in my head. Anna told me there was one piece that was too big to fit in the album, and handed me a large cardboard envelope. I opened it on one end and slid out the art board, which was covered with a translucent piece of vellum. It’s hard to explain what the feeling was like in seeing this totally unexpected near-miracle. The closest I can get is to say it was like in a cartoon when someone opens a thin little book and somehow a giant boxing glove on an inch-thick spring rockets out of it and socks them in the nose. I was numb, dazed and speechless. It took only a millisecond for me to see what it was and who and done it through that vellum. Anna says I was shaking a bit when I raised the vellum and got a good look at this incredible piece of art, but I don’t remember the few minutes right after I opened it… That’s just a little foggy.

The story doesn’t end there, however. After she told me most of the above tale, she said that she had spoken with Mort himself, and that Mort wanted me to call him and he wanted to sponsor me for membership in the National Cartoonists Society. I called him the next day, and soon I was an NCS member. Anna and I attended the very next Reuben awards in San Antonio, were Mort was unable to attend because his mother was extremely ill. Mort gave me the names of several people to look up on his behalf, and I was introduced to several big name cartoonists and members, including MAD editor Nick Meglin and MAD book editor Charlie Kochman. My membership in the NCS eventually led to me getting my work in front of Nick and Sam Viviano, which eventually led to my working for MAD. To say that anniversary present from Anna changed my life is no exaggeration. In the process I learned how rare it is to have a caricature of yourself by Mort Drucker. Longtime friends of his were amazed and jealous, saying that Mort just doesn’t DO that, and they had been asking for many years to no avail. We’ve since met Mort and Barbara several times and they are the most wonderful people you could possibly want to meet. Mort has offered me much advice, support and encouragement concerning my work.

So, this year for our anniversary I got Anna a lousy trip to Paris and dinner at this restaurant we like. They way I figure it, if I spend the next 20 years drenching her in diamonds, trips and designer clothes I may reach the foothills of the Mount Everest of anniversary presents, which as I type is hanging 3 feet from me in my studio. God I love that woman.

As promised, here’s some of the final art for the parody of “Grey’s Anatomy” due in MAD #472. Except for the fact that it looks nothing like George, it turned out okay considering both the time squeeze and the computer crash.

Here’s the final of the “Christmas” workplace poster art, which I just finished this morning.

Now I get to spend a few hours trying to rebuild my contact list and much of my data on the Mac Pro. You don’t really realize how much you depend on these boxes of circuits and wires until something like this happens. I keep thinking to myself “oh, I don’t have that anymore. do I?” and “Oh, I can’t do that anymore because that file is gone”. Lots of little things that add up to big things. Yesterday I realized that my entire e-mail archive and all my contacts are gone, and I didn’t think I had a way to get any of it back. Today I remembered I have a little used PDA that I happened to have syncing and charging on the PC only a few days before the crash, so I do have a complete list of my contacts and most of the e-mails that were in my main inbox… all the ones I’d saved in other folders are gone. Of course I’ll have to re-enter all the data by hand…. ecccchhhhh!

Looks like my new Mac Pro is finally coming around. After two re-installs of OS X the firmware update that kept hanging and crashing the computer finally took. It is important to note I did nothing different on tries number one and two, which resulted in my DVD drive drawer popping open and the computer freezing, than I did on successful try number three. It’s a little scary that the AppleCare people just shrugged their shoulders and said “well, it’s working now, so… no problem”. Seems to me there is a problem when apparently dumb luck is the only discernible reason for the solution of a problem. Well, it’s working now.

The Mac itself works great. I will say there is no real difference between the PC and the Mac with respect to the use of PhotoShop CS2, my Cintiq/Wacom tablet and doing my usual digital color work. The PC did just as well as the Mac did, and vice versa. I understand that PhotoShop CS2 is still not an IntelMac “Universal” program, and that it’s performance is actually degraded on the new Macs. Apparently the switch to an Intel chip is only advantageous on a new Mac with programs that are written for use on the Intel chip. Legacy programs that were written for PowerPC chips (the previous chip used by Apple) run on the new Macs under an emulation program called Rosetta. Similar to the Windows emulation software the old Mac’s used to use to run Windows programs on a PowerPC chip, Rosetta allows the PowerPC programs to work on IntelMacs… but slower than they would on a native PowerPC Mac. A lot of software companies are waiting for the next major version release of their programs to make the switch to a “Universal” version. Adobe’s are due in the spring. They say the Universal programs will run several times faster than their pervious counterparts. I did notice a little lag time on some functions in PhotoShop, but not bad. If the Universal flavor really is that much faster, I cannot wait until the new version comes out.

The latest scary thing is that my 30″ Apple Cinema Display is having issues. My Dell Precision Workstation had one of the few PC video cards with Dual DVI that could run one of those displays, so I got one about 2 years ago. Worked great on the PC except for these weird flickering green pixels that would crop up when the screen was totally black, like at start up or on a website with a black background. The green pixels are gone on the Mac, but the screen now will go crazy with digitized looking color shifts, and at one point it went completely haywire with patterns and lines every which way. This happens intermittently. I have not called tech support on that one as I have had no time. I am hoping the issue is with the fact that I have a 3 foot extension cable between the Mac and the monitor’s cable. That was not a problem with the PC, but who knows.

Otherwise mission accomplished with the “Grey’s Anatomy” final artwork. Done and in the can. Tomorrow I will format and upload a sneak peak at some of the color art. Tonight I’ll need to finish the workplace poster, then the Nader art on Thursday and Friday. Then maybe I can get some of the computer issues worked out. The bad news is that it is likely I will not be able to attend the NCN con even for that one day… Too much going on with the lost time. We’ll see if I can still pull it off.

The good news is I was able to salvage some of my data off the Dell. I had saved all my art files and some other stuff on my second hard drive, which was not damaged because I was not actually using the RAID system for the disks. The bad news is that the C drive is toast and I lost most of my business data from the first of the year on, which was the last time I backed up. Could be worse.

One good thing is that I was able to get all my audio and video off my iPod and into iTunes on the new Mac. Officially Apple, in it’s heavy handed efforts to curb “piracy” will not allow you to restore your music to a computer from your iPod. In other words, if your hard drive crashes and you did not back up your iTunes files, your iPod will not be able to restore your music, and you cannot sync up to your new computer (or old one with a new drive). Enter Senuti, a program that allows you to do just that. It will upload your songs, complete with artwork and settings, from your iPod onto your new computer, and then import it back into iTunes and restore your music library. Worked quite well. If you ever lose your hard drive and you have an iPod, I highly recommend getting Senuti to set things right.

Well, back to painting.!

You knew it was coming…..

Well, it finally happened. This morning I am coloring happily along in PhotoShop when the blue screen of death pops up on my PC monitor. For the most part Windows XP is a very stable OS and I sometimes go weeks without rebooting, but this one was bad. I instantly lost all the work I had been doing as the computer began dumping physical memory to reboot. Unfortunately it went downhill from there.

Apparently my Dell workstation uses a hard drive configuration called “RAID”, which as I understand it is for drive mirroring and server/data security. I don’t need those things, but they came with the system so I had them anyway. As it turns out, RAID drives as specially configured, and when your RAID goes south so does your drives… and all the data on them. So, my computer went from a fire-breathing graphics monster to a useless pile of crap in .5 seconds. I have to get “Grey’s Anantomy” done by Wednesday and was supposed to have a poster job done by today.

This was an emergency. I could not afford not to be working on this today. I could go to Best Buy and get a crappy PC anytime, but getting a good PC with the right hardware is not as easy. So, being down on PC’s anyway at the moment, I went to the one place in town I could walk in, buy a computer that would have the graphics firepower to do what I needed and get home in time to get back to it… yep, I went to the Apple Store.

Came home with a souped up Mac Pro with 4 GB ram, 2 x 3.0 Ghz processors and a 512 MB graphics card. I figured I’d see if those commercials about opening the box and starting to use the computer were accurate. Let’s just say that after one automatic firmware upgrade download, one firmware installation crash, one hour on the phone with tech support and a total reinstall of the system software I am still not using it and those commercials are a load of garbage. Right out of the box my behind.

Well, back to the cyber-battle. If I blow my deadlines I will be very angry with Michael Dell and Steve Jobs, in that order. This may put a damper on blog enties in the foreseeable future….

Q: What materials do you use to do your live caricatures?

A: I don’t do a lot of live caricature anymore, but when I do I’m still using the same basic materials I have for the last 20 plus years.

Paper: I buy large quantities of paper for the theme park operations, so I use a special paper that is difficult to get in an art store. It’s an bristol vellum, bright white, 12 x 16 inches and 67 lb weight. That’s a good, heavyweight paper without being a cardstock. It is smoother on one side than the other, so I can use the rough side if it’s humid outside, or the smooth on a nice, dry day. paper you get from an office supply store  is usually too thin and waxy, or too thick (cardstock). Every decent size city has a paper mill distributor or paper company that will sell small quantities if you are willing to pick it up and pay C.O.D. Look up these companies in the yellow pages and inquire about paper types they carry. Each are usually associated with a particular mill like Nekoosa, Georgia Pacific or similar. They will usually send you samples on request. I specifically use a Georgia Pacific, 67# vel.bristol white, which I buy in 26 x 40 sheets and have cut to 12 x 16 (4 sheets per large sheet).

Pencil: Yes, I use a pencil rather than a marker. That is mostly due to using the airbrush for color. When you use a marker, the heavy back of the lines forces you to really lay down a lot of paint to get any values to come out, which is a lot of work. The pencil blends well with the airbrush and creates a softer painted look rather than a stark line with color.

I use two different pencils. The small one is a Caran D’ache Fixpencil 3, which is a mechanical leadholder that takes a 3mm lead. I use a 4B or 6B lead, depending on the weather (softer lead for wetter conditions). Caran D’ache doesn’t make the Fixpencil 3 anymore, but you can still find them in art stores. They still make the leads, but only a 3B or a 6B. The 4B is a special lead Fasen Arts had made years ago. I use the Fixpencil 3 for most of the drawing. The other pencil I use is a Cretacolor leadholder, which has a big 5.6mm lead. Affectionately called a “fatty”, this is the pencil I use for the thickest lines of the drawing, like the outside of the face, the hair and much of the body. I use a 4B lead in it.

One other thing I do with the pencils is wrap them. Drawing for 12 hours straight can really mess with your hand, and holding a skinny, hard pencil doesn’t make it easier. I wrap the pencils with a soft foam wrap called “pre-wrap” or “sports wrap”. This is the wrap athletes use to wrap their ankles or wrists prior to taping them up. It’s a roll of thin, foam wrap that has no adhesive on it. I wrap it around the pencil until it’s well cushioned and much thicker. This makes it better to grip, softer and easier to hold. A rubber band holds the foam wrap in place. You can get the foam wrap in most drugstores and sports equipment stores, and it’s fairly cheap stuff.

Blending Stomp: I use this to add shading and quick values to the drawing. I use a big #8, and sand the ends off a bit so they are more round. I also will soak a new one in water for 20 minutes or so and let it dry out for a few days, which loosens the stomp and makes it softer.

Airbrush: I like the Iwata HP-SB plus, but the HP-SBS is also a viable live caricature brush. The SB is a smaller, more detail orientated brush and can easily be used for studio illustration as well as live caricature. The problem with the Iwatas is that there is no well-made bottle for the side feed brushes. Iwata has one but it’s not very well designed. I took the initiative and had custom bottle hardware made based on the old Paasche bottle design, and combined with a nalgene plastic bottle and a short length of poly tubing, I make my own custom bottles.

Paint: I use mostly Media Com-Art paints, either opaque or transparent. They are a water based acrylic and I add water to many of them so they are pretty thin and will not clog the brush. I mix several colors for flesh tones, flesh shadow and other specific tones. I never use white paint, however. That’s a bad thing to put thorough your brush and will cause clogging problems. The colors I use are opaque Iron Yellow, Toludene Red, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Black, Ultramarine Blue, Lime Green, Hansa Yellow and transparent Violet and Royal Blue.

Basically I’ve been using those same materials since 1985. They work very well and I like the final look they achieve. You can get most of them either online or at a local art supply store.

Eighteen years ago today I married my best friend, the love of my life and luckily a woman with very low standards in men, Anna Voss. We are celebrating tonight with a fancy dinner out. 18 years has gone by in the blink of an eye. I’m a very lucky man. As much as I’d like to write about my lovely wife and the wonderful years we’ve shared, there is something else I need to write about today.

Last year on this day Anna and I also celebrated our anniversary with a fancy dinner out. Unfortunately we spent most of it staring into our plates and our wine glasses, having a hard time concentrating on toasting the joy of the previous 17 years. Our minds were elsewhere, because on that same day, September 23rd 2005, my friend of 20 years, a man who was a mentor, a surrogate older brother and one of the people who gave me my start in the art of caricature, Gary Fasen, died very suddenly of complications relating to his diabetes. Gary had just celebrated his 47th birthday. Nobody saw it coming or expected it in the slightest… it took us all by surprise. On my old website I had a memorial page to him, which was lost when I had the site redone. This blog post will have to serve the same purpose.

Gary Fasen was a gifted artist, cartoonist, caricaturist and illustrator. He and his brother, Steve, gave me a job drawing caricatures at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, IL in 1985 when I was the tender age of 18. Gary was the manager and lead artist at Great America, and as such was the person who taught live caricature to the hundreds and hundreds of young artists who worked with him over the twenty plus years they had the operation. He eventually bought out his brother and owned the operation himself, in addition to his own endevours. Gary’s illustration work was terrific, doing work for national punlications including the “Limbaugh Letter” and for advertising. I still occasionally see his illustrations on candy displays in my local Blockbuster, which never ceases to make me smile because that artwork is so “Gary”.

Gary was an incredibly talented man, a generous person and one of the most genuine people I’ve ever had the privilege to know. He taught me to draw caricatures and to airbrush, he was a great friend and encouraged me to work hard to achieve my goals and dreams. His advice and direction to me has served as a guide all my adult life. Many National Caricaturist Network members and professional caricaturists knew Gary, who attended several NCN conventions, was instrumental in starting the careers of a lot of talented artists and was a mentor to many, many young caricaturists and cartoonists. He is greatly missed. The world is a poorer place without him. Some of his work is still up at his old website. I don’t know how long this will last, his old URL www.air-art.com no longer points to the site. I suppose it’s silly to think anyone will pay to have his website continue to be hosted after he has gone, but I hope it will. It would be sad to think his artwork will also disappear and will not be able to be seen and enjoyed by the world.

I remember Gary as a vibrant and funny guy who loved art and drawing. He was always there with advice and had a great deal of ‘common sense wisdom’. He was a down to earth guy, having come from a big family and working his way through college through is dad’s dairy business, where he spent several summers traveling to area dairy farms inseminating cows, which he described as being “up to his elbows is cowhood”. In fact he used to tell me that, although it had been ten years since he had done that particular job, there were still some cows in Minnesota that got misty-eyed when they heard his name.

Gary was also someone who was free with advice and support. He encouraged artists that worked with him to work hard to be the best they could be. He could be brutally honest. Once, on a long car ride with him back to Minnesota from the Six Flags park we worked at together in Illinois near the end of my first summer, he told me something I’ll never forget. He said very frankly that I was not the most naturally talented artist they’d ever had work for them, but that he expected me to go a lot farther in life and with my art than anybody he’d worked with so far because I had the “brains, ambition and plain old work ethic” to take my talents as far as I’d care to. I’ve remembered that round-about advice… that hard work and determination are as important, if not more important, than talent. I’ve tried hard not to let him down. He told me once not so long ago that he was proud of me. I was genuinely pleased and touched to hear that. He was like the older brother I never had… I wanted him to be proud of me. I owe him a lot.

Gary died one year ago today, on my wedding anniversary. I don’t think this day will ever go by without my thinking of him, but I hope in the years to come I can do so with more of a smile than I do today. His time of leaving us is still too near for that. Still, they say with the passage of time it becomes easier to celebrate a person’s life at these times than remember the sorrow of their deaths. I hope that is the case. Then I’ll have two things to celebrate every September 23rd. Tonight Anna and I will toast him, and hopefully be able to get on with the enjoyment of our evening together.

We all miss you, Gary. Peace.

Self-caricature by Gary

As promised, some of the pencils from my upcoming parody of “Grey’s Anatomy” in MAD:

I’ll post a sneak peek of some of the finished panels next week when it’s “in the can”. In the meantime, back to work!!!

Things are getting crazy in the studio. After finishing the pencil roughs (and I mean ROUGHS) for the “Gray’s Anatomy” parody for MAD, I just had time to ink and color the Scholastic illustration and ink the poster job before approvals came in from MAD. Haven’t touched the Nader finals yet. Hoo boy.

Here’s the final art for the Scholastic job. If the colors look garish and without a lot of contrast, it’s because I did it on purpose. The Scholastic publication this will appear in is printed on uncoated stock, and that causes the ink to soak into the paper. As a result, colors with too much black in the CMYK percentages get muddy and ugly. Therefore I needed to keep the colors bright and avoid too much “K” in the “CMYK”.

That is an interesting point. As an illustrator I try to take printing into account when doing the art. That’s hard to do with one time jobs, but in the case of multiple jobs for the same client, I can “tweak” my color and approach to make the most of the final result. For example, every time a MAD job sees print, I will compare the color on the printed page to the color on my computer screen. A long time ago I calibrated my monitor to match it as closely as possible. It’s impossible to match an RBG monitor that shows colors using a mixture of red, blue and green with a printed piece that uses cyan, magenta, red and black (CMYK), but you can get close with respect to certain colors and values. I’ve found that I can get my flesh colors and the values of those colors pretty close with my monitor, if I accept that my browns will be much less saturated in print than on my screen, and the blues will be darker and more saturated. I just make sure I use very warm, reddish browns when I color knowing the color shift will turn them more green and therefore more true brown in print. I downplay my blues knowing they will be brighter in print. In works pretty well for the MAD stuff, and holds up about the same for other publications as long as it’s a somewhat glossy stock like MAD uses these days. Scholastic warned me about the uncoated paper, and I kept it in mind. The technical side of print illustration is boring, but believe me art directors appreciate an illustrator that understands somewhat of the printing process… even if it is only to better choose colors in anticipation of a print job.

The other thing I got done before getting back to the MAD job was the inks on the latest workplace poster:

I’ll post the color version next week, but this will have to sit on the back burner for a while as I try and bang out the “Gray’s Anatomy” job. When you get multiple jobs going at the same time, you have to be able to switch back and forth during times when one job might be in for approvals of sketches and another has a deadline looming. It’s a balancing act, and if you fall behind then the late nights and energy drinks come into play.

So, don’t be surprised to see the Dreaded Deadline Demon rearing it’s ugly head on the blog in the next week or so. I’ll try and post some of the pencils for “Gray’s Anatomy” when I get to that point, but the roughs I sent MAD are too rough for that. When I work out some of the caricatures more completely I’ll post some images.