Q: My question is about how you go about getting your ideas for an assignment or a piece. I assume your clients offer different amount of direction, where do you get your concepts when you have a bit more freedom? Also, do you see the end image in your imagination before putting it down on paper? Have you ever been stymied?
A: I always tell people that illustration is communication, and my job as an illustrator is to communicate an idea, message or subject to the viewer through an image inthe same way the writer of whatever article I am illustration is doing with words. Since my work is humorous in nature my job is usually to add humor at the same time.
Sometimes the client has a very specific idea of what they want in their illustration, and sometimes I am allowed great freedom to come up with my own concept to deliver whatever message they are looking for. Usually it’s some combination of the two.
Sometimes an idea pops fully formed into my head, but much more often it’s a process. I start out reading the article and direction, and then begin with rough thumbnails. I doodle this and that, write down ideas, doodle some more, cross off things that aren’t working, and eventually work up three or more different ideas that I think have something going for them. It’s always harder when you have totally freedom to do come up with something by yourself… but the end result is usually a lot more creatively satisfying. You really have to think about the message and the best way to convey it, so that it is easy to understand and not ambiguous. The old adage that art is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration is very true.
I’ve never been stymied but I have done illustrations I’ve thought less successful than others. As long as the client is happy I am happy.
Thanks to Julie Tucker for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!
Virtually every year The Lovely Anna and I go to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, a weekends-only fair in August and September set up like a renaissance village complete with buildings, actors in character, shows, costuming and a ton of food and drink. Our first “Ren Fest” together was 20 years ago, right after we’d become engaged. We’ve only missed a handful of years since.
It’s a lot more fun to go in costume than just in jeans and a t-shirt. A lot of people really get dressed up and some play their part as well as any of the ‘professional’ actors on the grounds in character. Over the years we’ve pieced together our own outfits… there are lots of artisans selling some pretty impressive looking costumes and garments, as well as weapons and other accessories.
I got all my gear at the Ren Fest over the years, except the tights (old Batman costume) and the sword (won that playing blackjack in Vegas… long story). Anna made her dress, which looks fantastic. Here are some more pics from last weekend’s time traveling festivities:
The Dramatic Victoria and boyfriend Joe
The Effervescent (Princess) Gabrielle
Number One Son Thomas and the Old Man
The Minnesota Renaissance Festival is one of the highest regarded in the country, although most states have one. If you ever get a chance to go to one, take it. If done well they are great fun. Don’t just pass by the many shows and acts… they are highlights of the fair.
I am a terrible impressionist. I can only do impressions of other people doing impressions… like your standard Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sean Connery, etc. They aren’t very good. However I have found that many caricaturists are actually pretty good mimics. It might have to do with some kind of empathy with their subjects. ..who knows?
One such caricaturist is a young man from Hawaii who occasionally comments on this blog, Piotr Walczuk. He’s a fellow member of the National Caricaturists Network, and his talent for voices is amazing. I’ve been meaning to posts some links to his website for a while now, and now he’s got a series of videos on Youtube showcasing both his vocal talents and his comedy writing. Check these out, and then visit his Youtube site and see some of his other amazing videos. Great stuff.
I love the Patrick Warburton impression. My brother-in-law is married to Patrick’s sister, and I’ve met him several times. Dead on impression.
Here are a few of the projects I’ve wrapped up in the last week or so… at least the ones that are okay to share at this time:
Workplace Poster:
This one ended up being a lot tougher to do than expected, as the client wanted the main car on it’s own layer so he could do an animation of the image as well as a static poster. that meant I had to draw the cars parked behind the main car, as well as complete the front and back end of the main car. I also had the foreground cars on their own layer so the main car could pass behind them. The above is just the static image.
Website Logo Image-
This was a small job for a client that wanted an image for a “bad company” that is going to be featured as the example of why their company is good. I will also be doing a series of gag cartoons for the same client’s website. I’ll post a link when it’s up and running.
Personal Commission-
As a rule I do not do these, mainly because I have little time and have to charge a comparable amount to what a freelance job pays for a publication or advertising image… which frankly I don’t think the artwork is worth. However, if the interested party is willing to wait until I can squeeze it in and doesn’t balk at the pricetag, I will occasionally do something like this. The gentleman depicted waited three months for me to get this done.
Other Stuff…
MAD- My current MAD job got bumped from issue #483 and I’ll be putting it on hold while I work on a piece for “The MAD 20″, MAD’s annual look at their 20 dumbest things of the year that appears in every December issue. Articles in MAD sometimes get bumped, often in favor of some timely or hot topic piece that got put together very quickly, and regulated to either a later issue or the “evergreen drawer”. The “evergreen drawer” is a place MAD stashes completed jobs that are not of a timely nature and therefore won’t get irrelevant due to their subject matter… they are “ever green”. They can be pulled out at any time and used in case of some deadline disaster or if something doesn’t go as planned with another article. I’ve only had it happen to me twice, but I usually work on more timely pieces like TV or movie parodies. Anyway, I’ll finish the current job up as I wait for approvals on other jobs.
New Scholastic Job- Spot illustration for some of their magazines. Subject matter has to do with the elections.
Cover Illustration- That cover job I mentioned before will require a lot of redrawing as the presidential primary front runners have changed a lot in the last 12 months. This one is due later in October, so not rush (yet).
Meanwhile it’s off to the wine country in California. We will be stopping into the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, and will have the pleasure of seeing the exhibits as spending some time with friends and fellow cartoonists. Pictures of the trip are promised.
When I was a kid the start of the fall TV season was a big deal. We marked the calendar and gathered around the living room to watch our returning favorite shows and new shows that looked interesting. I remember seeing the season premiers of “The Incredible Hulk”, “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “The Wonderful World of Disney”, and my parents never missed “Dallas”, “M*A*S*H*” or “Dynasty”. Personally I was more excited over the start of the fall lineup of Saturday morning cartoons and shows… “Shazam/Isis Power Hour”, anyone?
Like most things in the 21st century, it’s all different now. TiVo and the DVR especially has changed the event-centric model of television viewing, and people just don’t plan their evenings around seeing some television show anymore. They still watch, they just do it on their own terms. Actually I kind of like that freedom, even if it takes away an element of family togetherness… if you can call everybody sitting around a glowing rectangle watching flickering images with glassy eyes being together. At least everyone is in the same room. No, the real interaction with TV shows is the resulting ‘water cooler’ conversations. Today’s television success is almost more about that than the ratings.
Last night one of the few TV shows I have any interest in premiered… “Heroes”. I took an hour off to watch (actually more like 45 minutes… thanks to the miracle of the DVR, I started watching at 8:15 and was able then to fast forward through the commercials. Sorry Nissan.) I am still under the gun with deadlines so I don’t have time right now to dissect the episode, but it was a decent beginning of a new season. I was happy to hear that this season would feature two shorter story arcs, which I think is smart since the novelty has worn off and the payout will have to be stepped up if this show wants to keep up it’s success from last year. We got a glimpse of some new super-powered characters and new plotlines were introduced, but overall it was vaguely unsatisfying. there is still plenty of time for some meaty storytelling.
I am going to have to record and watch the season premier of “Bionic Woman” after seeing some great teaser previews and hearing some good things about the show. That’s rare for me to actually start watching a show before it establishes itself, but this one looks like a lot of fun. With “Lost” not starting until who knows when, “Bionic Woman” will fill my alloted two TV show diet.
I think I’ll skip “Cavemen”, though. Something tells me those actors are going to categorize their participation in that show in the “have to live it down” column.
Very busy trying to get caught up before taking a little trip to celebrate our 19th wedding anniversary (which was yesterday) this weekend to the Sonoma wine country…
Uh oh! Looks like the mailbag is empty! only the second time in well over a year…
When I get some fresh questions concerning cartooning, illustration, freelancing, MAD Magazine or other similar subjects I’ll be happy to answer them as best I can. E-mail me your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!
It’s been a while since I posted about my workout routines. Briefly, about 5 years ago I got motivated by some shocking pictures of a fat, middle aged guy with my face and got back into the gym for the first time in many years. I’ve been working out ever since with a personal trainer, currently Ryan Branson who operates out of a studio gym in Burnsville, MN. I do a constantly changing periodization program that switches from endurance to hypertrophy (mass building) to strength and power.
This summer I spent mostly in a high endurance/cardio program designed to give me a break from building size while at the same time dropping bodyfat and building my endurance and ‘wind’. It was a grueling program and I lost a fair amount of size and strength doing it. Not my favorite thing to do but you have to switch tracks like that to keep your body guessing and resetting for another round of the heavy stuff.
For about the last month I’m back to a mass building program. Currently we are doing a decending rep/increasing weight routine. We started out at 3 sets of 12 reps per movement for two weeks, then 3 sets of 10 reps with heavier weight the next, followed by this week of 4 sets of 10 reps of each movement. In the next few weeks we’ll be dropping to 8 reps, then 6, then 4 as the weights really start going up. I work out 4 days a week doing back, chest/biceps, legs and shoulders/triceps on separate days. We are concentrating on the big compound movements like presses, deadlifts and squats.
One of the interesting things about bodybuilding is that your body has a ‘memory’ when it comes to strength and size. Once you build up to a certain level of strength and mass, your muscles will remember that level and after taking some time off to do a different routine they will get back to that remembered level a lot faster than it originally took to reach it. Right now after only four weeks I am close to my peak size. I don’t do measurements but just eyeball it and use the scale to keep track of mass. I’m just a few pounds off my heaviest weight with minimal gains in body fat (some is unavoidable).
Here are some pictures of some of the movements in my chest/biceps routine:
Incline chest press, mid-movement. This builds the upper chest.
Dumbbell flys, mid-movement. This builds the outer chest.
Decline cable crossovers, top of movement…
… at the bottom. This builds the inner and lower chest.
Dumbbell twist curls, bottom of movement…
…near the top. The “twist” is a rotation of the wrist from bottom to top. At the very top my knuckles will be pointing at the floor with my palms up. This develops the bicep “peak”.
Seated dumbell curls, also with a twist.
Taking a breather….
This routine also includes flat bench presses, dumbbell mid presses, kettlebell power swings, upward cable crossovers and wide grip barbell curls.
Gaining mass is hard work, and not just in the gym. Your diet needs to be strong or you will just be spinning your wheels. I have to make sure I get some good quality protein and low-glycemic carbs in every three hours all day long after a heavy workout. If I miss a few meals my body goes from muscle-building mode to starvation-prevention mode, and will not only store fat from the smallest amount of ingested calories, but will cannibalize the muscle tissue itself as fuel. That is a waste of all that effort. That’s also a lot of food to eat all day.
At 41 I can tell it’s a lot harder to recover from workouts than it used to be, so I don’t know how long I can keep it up. Right now I still enjoy it and it’s nice to be in good shape this late in life, especially considering I sit on my ass for a living. Also I do not get messed with in bars and my daughters boyfriends are scared to death of me, which are nice bonuses.
The video above contains highlights (term used loosely) from a press conference by O.J. Simpson‘s lawyer the other day. Watch the guy on the right in the ballcap… see the oily lawyer squirm. You have to love it when some clown like this lawyer is trying to act like a big shot and puff up in front of the cameras, only to have someone demonstrate how utterly ridiculous and unimportant the whole circus is. The “high five” comment had me practically in tears from laughing. The bit with the cell phone also was a hoot.
Anyone who has ever watched “Jimmy Kimmel Live” (that would be Jimmy’s mom and… ???) has seen the crazy Jake Byrd and his antics in conjunction with celebrity court cases and their television coverage. Jake appears wearing a t-shirt and baseball cap with nutty sayings on them, and backpack all over a shirt and tie. He makes a mockery of press conferences and television reporting of celebrity court news ‘events’… not a very hard thing to do since most of them are mockeries in and of themselves… but he does it with style. He has managed to get on camera and been included in legitimate press stories and coverage of events like Micheal Jackson‘s trial and Paris Hilton‘s return to jail without being suspected as being an actor playing a character ala Borat. Frankly I think he comes off as being a little on the ‘special needs’ side, which automatically places a social/politically correct block on getting angry or taking action to have him removed. People like this lawyer are taken aback and not sure what to do, so they just try to ignore him and he just keeps going.
In fact he is an actor as well as a comedy writer. His real name is Anthony Barbieri, and MAD readers will recognize him as the writer of the long running “Monroe” feature in MAD, illustrated for years by Bill Wray and recently taken over by Tom Fowler. I had no idea that Jake Byrd and Anthony Barbieri were one and the same guy.
