In my frenzy to do errands and non-art related stuff I almost forgot the Sketch O’The Day! Today’s sketch is one of my favorite authors (which I’ve discussed here several times), Stephen King:

Not enormously successful. If you draw King, you want to make him menacing and moody, not with a goofy grin. He is inherently goofy looking, though (sorry, Steve). I am just finishing the audiobook The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. I’m at the part I hate to read/listen to. Not because it’s bad… it just means the end of the ride is near. I intend to write a review of the series once I am done. I’ve listened to/read this series many times, and it’s one of my all time favorites.

I’ve got a TV parody for MAD in the works and I’ll be really going to town on that starting today.

Here’s my latest poster illustration for the workplace poster client:

Honestly, many of these poster jobs turn out so-so and I’m not always thrilled with the final results. This one I thought was a fun one and it shows in the final. Interesting scene, lots of fun, expressive faces to draw and the kind of interacting crowd and environment I always find fun to work out and render. It’s always a nice break when I do something without having a caricature involved.

Recent Octogenarian, singer Tony Bennett:

I had no idea the following was going on:

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

Groups Form Illustrators’ Rights Coalition

A coalition of U.S. illustrators’ organizations have come together to speak with one voice on behalf of artists’ reprographic rights. That was the message delivered by the Illustrators’ Partnership to the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO) which met in conference Oct. 28 – Nov. 2 in Auckland, New Zealand. Representing the coalition were artists Cynthia Turner and Brad Holland of the Illustrators’ Partnership and Terrence Brown, Director of the Society of Illustrators. The twelve groups are:

• The Illustrators’ Partnership
• The Association of Medical Illustrators
• The Society of Illustrators, New York
• The American Society of Architectural Illustrators
• The National Cartoonists Society
• The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators
• The San Francisco Society of Illustrators
• The Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators
• The American Society of Aviation Artists
• The Society of Illustrators, Los Angeles
• The Society of Illustrators of San Diego
• The Illustrators Club of Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia

The subject of the international conference was the licensing of visual art in the digital age, and the message delivered by the American groups was a response to the confusion that now exists because of competing claims to artists’ reprographic royalties currently being made by publishers, stock houses, free culture advocates and others.

The twelve U.S. Organizations, representing diverse genres of visual art, united to deliver a “White Paper” to the governing board of IFFRO. They were invited to address the full General Assembly of the international copyright societies. Their statement specified the intent of these groups to unite to constitute the “relevant rightsholder class” to represent the interests of their members in those cases where artists cannot monitor their rights themselves. At a previous meeting, this right had been challenged by a representative of the American publishers’ licensing arm, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).

At stake is the future of reproduction rights licensing of visual art, in particular where royalties are amassed collectively. In the past this meant “reprographic” rights – the right of organizations, businesses and institutions to photocopy great volumes of published material. But as digital copying replaces traditional xerography, the volume of collective licensing is increasing. The concern for American illustrators is that as visual arts licensing increases through reprographic channels, digital rights revenues may slip away from artists and reps without their knowledge.

The coalition’s white paper was the result of a “summit meeting” of illustrators’ organizations convened September 14 by Terry Brown at the Society of Illustrators. It capped several years of research by the Illustrators’ Partnership and the Association of Medical Illustrators and it followed a June “fact finding” visit to the U.S. by Mr. Mats Lindberg, President of the European Visual Artists society and Chairman of the Visual Arts Working Group of IFRRO. The chaotic state of visual arts licensing in the U.S. is a concern to collecting societies in other countries where artists rights are better honored.
________________________

A copy of the statement and white paper will be forthcoming.

Interesting. International copyright issues have always been a big problem, but as the globe continues to shrink there should be a natural movement for visual artists of many countries to lobby to protect their rights.

Now if they can only do something about the foreign crooks that keep stealing caricatures and photos for their “stamps” and hawk them on eBay!

A very small study of Pamela Anderson’s once again ex, Kid Rock:

A good friend convinced me that selling this artwork for the song I was asking was a disservice. Maybe it will never be sellable for much more than I was asking, but it is worth more to me.  I guess the after market for pages from MAD isn’t worth much if your last name isn’t Drucker, Davis, Wood or similar… or more accurately if you aren’t in the same league as those guys.  Of course, who is?

I’ve ended my eBay auction and taken the references to selling the parody art for Battyman Begone off the Blog and the Studio Store. Maybe one day I will be able to get a more appropriate price for them. In the meantime I’d rather keep the art.

As long as I’m on the subject, MAD also tried another on-line endeavor years ago in conjunction with AOL. It was called the “RED” page and was a special teen orientated AOL site. MAD contributed a daily cartoon for the page. This was really a fun job, as it was a quick image and a quick turnaround. MAD needed a digital JPG file at 300 x 300 dpi, usually withing a few hours of calling with the job. It was almost like doing newspaper work, and it paid pretty well considering the short time involved.

In order to get these done quickly, I would skip the inking stage altogether. I’d do a tight pencil, send it in for approval, and then do a high res scan and clean it up in PhotoShop, darkening the lines and increasing the contrast. Then I’d do a quick digital color job and e-mail it to MAD.

Rooting around through some old disks I found most of the images I did for this project, which only lasted about 5 weeks or so:

I honestly don’t remember the gags that went along with these, but they were often one image in a list of dumb things about something, or part of a small gag article. It was a fun side project while it lasted. There were several artists that did the dailies, including Ray Alma and Scott Bricher.

A very quick one of former NFL running back turned reality TV dancer Emmitt Smith:

I guess he won something either by dancing or by wearing the dumbest outfit ever worn by a man on television… I don’t get ‘reality’ TV.

MAD has had several different website designs and redesigns over the last five or so years. They’ve done numerous things, like try and make it an extension of the magazine with original content updated weekly. As I wrote in the mailbag yesterday, I happened along at the time they were first attempting this, and it led to my getting some assignments that were not for print but for the website.

They actually had a separate editor that was handling the content, which generally involved a list or short article and some kind of image. Sometimes it was just a static article, but usually it involved some kind of javascript mouseover effect. There was even a time where they were doing some flash animation. It was a grand idea, but it was short lived, only lasting for a few months. I suspect the costs involved with paying the artists, writers, editor and web design people proved to be too much, or perhaps it was just too hard to get the site updated regularly enough. Maybe the corporate bean counters put a stop to it. Today their website is an extension of the DC Comic’s site, and doesn’t much reflect the magazine itself. It has a monthly update with some flash animation, and a PDF file of some sneak peeks at the current issue.

I think that’s a shame about the original content, as some of the web stuff was pretty funny. Scott Bricher ended up doing much of that art, since he was the resident digital artist in MAD’s bullpen. I only remember doing three pieces.

I was thinking about that web stuff I did for MAD when I answered the mailbag question, and I started wondering what happened to it. Some of the old stuff is archived on the new MAD site under Past Madness, but none of the early stuff that I did. Just for fun I googled several key words that related to the subjects of some of the ones I did. Low and behold, I found these orphaned pages circa August 2000:

Presidential Survivor

MAD’s Realistic Fantasy Football League

There’s some of the first art I ever did for MAD… how the hell did I ever get a call back??? Amazing what kind of stuff is sitting around on a server in cyberspace somewhere, that nobody bothered to delete. As far as I know, no links to these pages exist anywhere official.

Another Heroes cast member, Hayden Panettiere:

Save the Cheerleader, Save the World!