Q: Considering your recent surgery: If your ‘normal’ level of output of artwork (for want of a better expression) is affected for some reason such as illness, injury etc, do you find it hard to regain the motivation you had before? I try to draw every day but find that if I go for a period where I have no significant commissions or projects, or when I recently suffered from flu, and I found it really quite difficult to motivate myself again. When I did grasp the pencils again I didn’t think the quality of my work was as good. Do you have any tips to prevent this? Or to cope with this?

A: As far as my shoulder surgery goes, it was surprisingly inconvenient to work with only one hand. It slowed me down but I muddled through. Now the left arm, although still in a sling for 3 more weeks, is functional enough that it can rest pain free on the drawing board and support the parer, so it’s easier now. No, I don’t really find it hard to get back to work after any time off… usually I am anxious to get back to the drawing board.

Your question eludes to a larger question concerning working in a creative field such as art, writing, music, etc.: how much should “creative motivation” (i.e. your “muse”) govern your output and work?

From a freelance illustration perspective, the answer should be “not at all”, but realistically it does have an effect on one’s work, both in productivity and sometimes quality.

A fine artist can afford to work when the mood hits them (usually), as they create their art on their own terms and according to their own pace… at least ideally. Illustrators create art on other people’s terms (read: art directors/clients). We cannot easily afford to put off working on something just because we aren’t “in the mood”. Everybody goes through periods where they just don’t feel much like working, and in a creative field that can have a real effect on the work itself. I know when I am in the right frame of mind, the drawings can fly almost effortlessly from the pencil, and at other times it’s a struggle just to draw a single face or hand. Nothing seems to go right, and it can be very frustrating.

I think there is a difference between a true creative “block” and just being lethargic. The former truly does not happen to me all that often. The latter does all the time. I’ve found I can work through not being “in the mood” by setting little goals… just getting through the background or the main figure of a sketch before stepping away for a little while. Sometimes I just have to suck it up and keep on drawing. I usually find that after a while I discover the groove and “get my head” into the project… after that it get’s easier.

A true creative block is different. Say I am drawing along and hit a part of the job I just can’t get right. I draw erase draw erase draw erase and it just isn’t happening. That is the time to step away and do something completely different for a while. Coming back after even just an hour of different work like doing bills or sweeping the garage will often give you a fresh eye.

Of course deadlines are the Great Motivator. There is nothing like a deadline to wipe away perceived blocks and get the creative juices flowing… which is why I leave everything until the last minute!

Thanks to Rob Howell 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!

The Lovely Anna and I are on our way to London for a week of sightseeing and relaxation. We are travelling with her parents, staying in thier timeshare in the heart of the city. I’ve never been other than trapped in Heathrow wating for a connecting flight, and have always wanted to visit England. I’ll have some posts from the other side of the pond next week.

This is a picture of one of my first theme park caricatures in progress,
taken at Great America in Gurnee, IL in the summer of 1985.

People sometimes ask what got me started doing what I do. As far back as I can remember I wanted to be an artist. Comic books and Batman got me started loving art and storytelling, but I never set out nor really wanted to be a comic book artist. The truth is I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with art… I just wanted to be a “commercial artist” and make a living drawing and illustrating. Caricature was not something that particular interested me early on. I knew what caricature was, of course, but I never made a connection between it and what I did as an artist, or what I wanted to do. That would all change one day thanks to a pretentious art teacher and a pointless art class at the University of Minnesota in 1985, and the change of heart of another caricature artist.

I wish I could remember the name of that art teacher at the U of M… I’d send her flowers.

The class was called “alternative sculpture”, which was one of those silly filler classes that applied to virtually no actual career direction, but was apparently just there to fill up student schedules and collect tuition money for credits. It was “alternative” because you created your sculptures with any material EXCEPT clay or similar. I could go on about how big a waste of time that was, but suffice it to say I was disappointed but it was the only art class with room in it when I registered. The class was so boring and useless I took to skipping it a lot.

I was skipping the class one day and wasting time in the art building commons area when I spotted a flier on the wall that said “can you draw?”. It was an advertisement for caricaturists to work at a local theme park called Valleyfair by a company called Fasen Arts. I thought I could draw pretty good, so I answered the ad and mailed them some drawings. A few weeks later I interviewed for the job with the company’s owner, Steve Fasen. I showed him a number of drawings I had done of celebrities, and he critiqued me pretty harshly before sending me on my way with a “we’ll give you a call”.

Now, Steve is quite a guy, and today I count him as one of my good friends as well as a mentor and surrogate big brother. He’s a great caricaturist and an even better businessman. However Steve has a very selective memory. He will tell you that he took one look at my work and hired me on the spot, knowing I would really take to caricature and make it one of the center points of my career. That’s not how it happened. I in fact did not get the job at Valleyfair, and heard nothing from them for weeks (not that I blame them… despite my overconfidence I know in retrospect my work wasn’t very impressive). Just as I was figuring I was out of luck, I got a call to do a second interview at Steve’s home. There I was given a quick lesson on live work and tossed into a chair and made to draw Steve as his brother Gary watched over my shoulder. No pressure! Wish I had that drawing today… it must have been awful.

Well, not too awful. I did get a job, but not at Valleyfair. Fasen Arts had another operation in a theme park near Chicago called Great America, and they said they had a place for me there. So, I packed my bags and moved to Waukegan, IL, where I lived in a townhouse with 5 other caricature/airbrush T-shirt artists I did not know, worked 12 hours a day 6 days a week all summer and had my life irrevocably changed…. I later found out that I got the job only because another artist who they had selected bowed out, deciding to stick to gigs and fair work back in Minnesota.

I wish I knew the name of that artist… I’d send her flowers, too.

That summer I fell in love with the art of caricature and cartooning at the same time I learned what it would take to realize my dreams of being a working artist. I was privileged to work with a small group of outstanding artists, most of whom went on to have very successful careers in animation, illustration, comic books, children’s book illustration and fine art. I was humbled by the talent these guys possessed, and realized quickly this art thing was not something you just did or were born with… it was something you had to work incredibly hard at. That summer got me off my rear end and instilled a determination and drive in me that still motivates me today. I drew until my hand was sore… literally. I worked hard at my skills and did live caricatures at Great America every summer all through college, eventually being offered a manager/trainer job by the Fasens at a new operation at Six Flags Atlanta. From there I started my own caricature operations and began freelancing. It was a long road (one I’m still on), with many lucky breaks and many failures and roadblocks. I am still constantly humbled by the skills and talents of artists I admire and that continues to motivate me to improve my abilities and to grow as an artist. My philosophy is still “be confident in your skills today, but do not be satisfied if they are still the same skills tomorrow”.  Today I am lucky enough to do what I love and earn a living at it, supporting and raising my family in the process.

…and I owe it all to a boring art class and a caricature artist who got cold feet.

Busy, busy, busy trying to get some stuff wrapped up before a big trip next week… the Demon is updated a little after current events. It’s the wrong arm, but you get the idea.

The International Society of Caricaturist Artists does a daily sketch challenge on thier private forum where they pick a celebrity who’s birthday is that day, and a bunch of artists do a caricature of him or her. Lots of fun and some great sketches. I wish I had time to participate more, but alas that’s impossible. Yesterday as I was searching for a subject for the “Sketch o’the Week” I checked into the ISCA forum and found April 7th’s birthday target was the great film director Francis Ford Coppola, so I thought for once I’d participate via my weekly sketch. So here is my stab at the Oscar winning filmmaker… and a good wine maker as well. The Lovely Anna and I particularly enjoy his Rubicon bordeaux wines.

Here’s a job I did a month or two back that is now on the stands so I can show some of the process and the end result. I used my new “colored line” technique, which is really growing on me, and also seems to be a hit with clients.

The job: Cover illustration with a “survivor” theme showing how library budgets are getting squeezed and cut, but the libraries are “surviving”. They wanted a mixture of calm definace and some anxiety on behalf of the librarians, with sharks (aka budget cutters) eating away at their resources.

Here are three initail rough sketches. They really are the same concept but at three different angles:

“Normal” horizon line

Upward looking angle…

Bird’s eye view

The original idea was to have the island actually be made of money, and the sharks are eating it away. It was decided that was not necessary to convey the message, so the island got changed to a sand one, with the sharks chomping on random bills.

The client liked the downward angle. No scan of the final pencils, but here are the final inks:

Inked in black as always. The color is added to the lines via the line selection trick I outlined some time back, and then simply painted over in different colors. I start out with a basic red/brown color, and then paint over them as needed.

Here is the image at a partial colored stage. You can see the color I use for the linework, which I change as I go:

And here is the final art:

Click for a closer look…

Here are a few close ups to show the colored lines as they relate to the areas they define:

There is a softness/ textural quality to this technique that makes it more versitile than the traditional black line/color look of my work in MAD, for example. It’s still “me” but just in a different light. The technique needs refining but it’s got promise.

Although they’d like to scout the Far East like many other teams do looking for
phenoms playing in Asia, the Minnesota Twins are too cheap to send their talent
scouts any farther east than Peoria, Illinois… (from MAD #416)

Ah…. Baseball. The Great American Pastime. The 2009 season starts today and, as always, hope springs eternal for the Hometown Nine… at least for a little while.

Pro sports for the most part really turn me off. I like and follow the NFL mostly because being born and raised in Wisconsin I am hardwired as a Green Bay Packer fan, but the prancing, posturing players make me sick. Pro basketball is populated by lazy, pampered crybabies that give 100% effort about 5% of the time. Hockey never interested me much. Ditto golf, tennis and the lesser pro sports like soccer. Baseball is really the only sport I still get enthusiastic about.

It isn’t perfect. Egos and poor sportsmanship are becoming more and more prevalent, but it is still far less of a problem than in the other major sports. I think it’s because baseball is the last major pro sport where you have to work your way up to the major leagues through an unglamorous minor league system. Most MLB players have to toil for years in the minors, working hard to get to “the show”… and the majority never do make it to the big leagues. It’s harder to forget where you came from when it took that much time and effort to get to the top and so many of your fellow players don’t make it at all. For football and basketball, college play is their “minor leagues”, but there is no comparison. Players are scouted from junior high these days, and by the time they get to the college level (if they even do, basketball players are entering the draft right from high school more and more, or leaving college for the pros early) they are practically inked in for being a pro. They get the superstar treatment early, and a young ego does not often remain grounded in that kind of environment. That’s why some of these pro athletes think the sun rises and sets on them… they’ve been told it does from an early age. Baseball, with a few notable exceptions (Barry Bonds, anyone?), largely avoids that with their blue collar system.

Best of all with baseball… it’s a long season at 162 games. Some call that a disadvantage in this day of short attention spans and instant gratification. I think it’s the opposite. The long season allows for the unquestioned result of the best teams reaching the post season. In football, with only 16 games, any team can get hot/lucky enough to make the playoffs, and a few lucky bounces can get them far in the postseason. No way can that happen in baseball. Likewise the long season allows for team fans to hang on to the hope their team will make a run and be a factor in the race for a playoff spot… often football and basketball teams have no hope after only 25% of the season is played. Finally, the game itself is more relaxing to experience. You can cheer and get excited if your team does good, but you don’t need to be disheartened if they play poorly, as there is always the next game. You can go get a hot dog and soda or chat with your neighbor and not miss much of the game. Plus, there are just a lot more games to enjoy. If football and basketball are action movies, baseball is suspense.

I love taking my kids to a handful of games a season… and I’m REALLY looking forward to doing so next year in the Twin’s new outdoor park. I used to do a fair amount of work for the Minnesota Twins, with comp tickets being a perk. Even without comps, baseball remains the most affordable pro sport, with some seats less than $10 each and some promotions making it even cheaper. Last summer our extended family went to a Twins games on a promo Sunday where one adult ticket got you two under 16 kids in for free. I think 20 of us went for only $72 in tickets. That’s $3.60 each. That’s less than some types of coffee at Starbucks,

I love talking baseball with my dad, who actually is as much a Twins fan as a Milwaukee Brewers fan these days. The famous line from “City Slickers” always comes to mind, when Daniel Stern tells Billy Crystal about how, no matter how big the differences were between himself and his father, they could always “talk about baseball”.

More than anything, I love having my studio windows opened on a summer afternoon, feeling the warm breeze, sipping a Coke, hearing somebody’s lawn mower in the distance and listening to the game on the radio while I am working. That is pure Americana.

So, play ball, boys of summer. Welcome back.

Q: When you do the splash page for say the “30 Rock” satire you did, how do you figure out how the background fits in reference to the characters? is there some simple geometry that you use? I always seem to have too big of a space, or everything looks like its getting crammed in. I am not really used to drawing characters in an environment, do you have any advise? Also when you do a big ensemble do you ever cheat and draw characters separately and add them or do you keep them the same from the rough stage?

A: Here’s the “30 Rock” splash referred to:

Click for a closer look…

It all starts with having to work out the placement of the “principals” with respect to the dialogue boxes. MAD initially sends me a layout:

This one was pretty easy, as there is very little dialogue compared to some I’ve had to work on. Obviously the characters speaking the lines need to be near their boxes… everything else is totally up to me.

The first thing I do is rough out the basic “scene” or environment, then place the principals in. Sorry I do not scan jobs in at these stages, so I have no visuals to demonstrate. Once I have the principals in place, I fill out the background adding elements and gags. There is no formula or system for this other than basic balance.

Click for a closer look

I add elements to the backgrounds based on the feel of balance in the piece. With the heavier number of principal characters on the right I needed some visual balance on the left, so I added the body guards, Rachel Drach and the visual gag of the “german shepherds” from Tina Fey‘s American Express commercial, plus her kid, the Alfred Emmy and the Lorne Michaels dartboard. Even so it’s a little right heavy, but it’s working. I have a more complete description of working with primary and secondary characters in this post.

Balance also means filling areas that have too much dead space with something to break it up. That’s where objects like the spilled coffee cup, script pages and stage lights come in. It’s a balancing act, because it would be easy to become too busy by filling every available space with something.

What I will do once the important elements are in place is to step back and look at the piece from a little distance, unfocusing my eyes or looking through squinted eyes. This eliminates the detail and allows you to look at the basic shapes and values. You have to use a little imagination, as the values you add later will change the balance. I knew the upper area would be heavy black, and where other black elements would be… in fact I actually roughed those values in at the pencil sketch stage… that helps.

I wish I had a magic bullet for this, but it’s always been a building and balance process for me without a formula or logical set of rules to apply.

As to your final question: I almost never draw the caricatures separately and paste them in… that inevitably leads to a vaguely disjointed and awkward feel to the illustration.

Thanks to Mark Grant 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!

It was recently announced by the International Society of Caricature Artists (ISCA) convention organizers that, for the first time ever, non-ISCA members are able to attend the main speaker presentations and panels for only $99.00 (cheap!). So come to beautiful… uh…. downtown Sandusky Ohio this November to listen to a bunch of MAD artists make fools of themselves.

Speaking of MAD artists making fools of themselves… back when we was just a young and impressionable lad of 15, long before he became a world famous caricaturist, illustrator and MAD artist/art director, a beardless (!) Sam Viviano paid a visit to the DC Comics offices to show what he described once to me as “bad drawings of Batman” to the DC editors. He chronicled his experience in comic form and sent it to DC, who promptly printed it in several of their titles! Behold the young Sam’s DC odyssey:

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

For a one-armed artist I am staying pretty busy. Here’s what I’ve got going right now on the drawing board:

NCS Reuben T-shirt Illustration- Wrapping this up over the weekend. I will share it once I get the okay from NCS president Jeff Keane.

Cover art for Stay Tooned #4- I was honored to be asked to do the cover for John Read‘s terrific magazine. That I will finish next week.

MAD job- Two pager that got bumped from issue 500 and will now be in #501, so a ton of time before that is due.

Workplace poster- My usual monthly assignment from The Marlin Company. Incidentally they are preparing to sell individual copies of these posters as stock allows on their website, so when I get more info on that I’ll let people know if they are interested.

“Super Capers” DVD comic- Not much to this as all I did was crop and size the panels of the comic into a DVD video frame format. It will be included on the DVD release of the movie as a video comic.

Not much I can share at this time, but here are cropped sneak peaks from two recent jobs where I used the colored line technique I’ve been experimenting with. I will be able to show the full jobs plus sketches, etc. sometime later this month: