Since I’ve been remodeling the studio I’ve been going through a lot of old piles of drawings and such. I found this old rough sketch of Samuel L. Jackson that was supposed to be a preliminary for a theme park sample that I never got around to finishing. I remember liking it when I did it, but now… meh.
This past weekend the Southeast chapter of the National Cartoonists Society had a chapter event in Asheville, NC featuring a whole gaggle of members of the “Usual Gang of Idiots”, plus a bunch of other terrific cartoonists. I wish I would have been able to attend, but it was just impossible for me to get away. The lineup of speakers above is certainly stellar.
However, due to the magic of the internet here are three YouTube videos featuring Nick Meglin and Jack Davis. Great stuff from two great guys: EDIT- Sadly somebody objected to the posting of these videos, presumably either Nick or Jack, and Brian had to remove them from YouTube. That’s too bad, because there was nothing about these that anyone would object to or prevented in any way the ability for those featured in the videos from making money. In fact, it’s exactly this kind of exposure on the internet that could lead to MORE speaking gigs, some of which might the speaker(s) would get paid for. Oh well.
Thanks to Brian Vasilik, caricaturist and illustrator who attended the event and uploaded these videos for the rest of the world to enjoy.
Q: It is my experience that digital art, even when scanned inks and with digital finishing, takes longer to do, for the artist, than if the art were totally done traditionally. A problem I keep running into is that clients assume anything digital is faster and easier for an artist to complete. Have you found that your working method is any faster than if you worked entirely traditionally? I will agree that a digital file can be easier to make corrections on; but does that make up for a longer initial work time?
A: That question seems to ask two things. First it seems to ask if it’s wrong for clients to think working digitally is easier and faster, and (I assume) then think they should have to pay less. Second if I think digital work is faster.
I’d have to disagree with your statement that digital art takes longer than traditional art. Of course it is all dependent on the style and final look of the work, but for me personally the time involved is about the same, or if anything it’s a little faster to work digitally. Not much, but a little. There is a certain fearlessness about working on the computer that can allow for a looser and more aggressive approach to the final work, but then again it can also lead to spending a lot of time on some insignificant part of an illustration due to the computer’s lack of scale.
By “lack of scale” I mean it’s a lot harder to grasp the actual size of a given illustration when working digitally. It all depends on your monitor’s resolution, the image’s DPI, etc., but it’s very easy to get lost int he scale and end up doing a lot more work that what is necessary on a job.
Here’s an example. The first job I did after getting my Cintiq was the MAD Magazine parody of the movie “Van Helsing”. I got the Cintiq initially because I thought it would increase my productivity, but I immediately ran into the “scaling” issue. I was happily coloring away on the splash page, working at print size, 300 dpi at 100% zoom. I spent about 20 or so minutes coloring this face in one of the splash page panels:
Okay… it doesn’t look like I spent that much time on it, but I I played with the muted, grayish skin tones, and made his teeth all yellowish, added shadows and modeling. I thought it looked pretty good.
Here was the problem. That face took me 20 minutes to paint. Here is a scan of the actual page at 300 dpi and 100% zoom with a familiar object to demonstrate scale:
That’s right, I spent 20 minutes painting something smaller than a dime on the printed page. You can imagine how long it took to do the rest of the two page splash. Ever since then I work at 50% zoom for most of the coloring I do… on the Cintiq screen that roughly translates to 150% of physical print size, so I get adequate detail without doing so much that it’s lost when the thing is in print.
Once you get a handle on the scale issue, things go much quicker digitally.
As far as the client is concerned, It should not matter to them how much time it takes to do an illustration, at least not in regards to the payment. Illustrators are not paid by how much time it takes to do a given piece, they are paid based on the usage of that piece. It’s the COPYRIGHT to use the art an illustrator sells, not the art itself. The art gets you the job, bit the usage of your art is what has value. I could do the exact same illustration for two different clients, and if client A uses it in a national ad campaign I’ll get paid many thousands for the piece. However if client B is the local pizzeria using it for a local flyer ad I’ll get paid significantly less. Same amount of physical work, totally different uses and therefore totally different payments. I wrote extensively about this subject some time back.
It’s interesting how some clients do consider the relative ease or difficulty of a given illustration to be a factor in what they pay. Some might think that if it’s a simple image with little background and detail it’s somehow worth less that something that took you a long time to create. Considering digital art to be “easier” might cause clients to think they should pay less. These “clients” are inexperienced buyers of illustration and it’s up to you to educate them in how it works.
Thanks to Ernie Kwiat 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!
I just found out through the grapevine that MAD is doing a Volume 2 of MAD About SuperHeroes, due out in January. The cover image above is an advance cover and the actual cover will be different.
I was bummed out when they came out with the first MAD About Super Heroes as I had just done the “X-Men 2″ parody and it missed the publication deadline of the book. I will definitely be well represented in this book, however. It should contain my parodies of “Spider-Man” 1 and 2, X-Men 2, “Batman Begins”, “Superman Returns”,” Iron Man”, “The Dark Knight”, “Watchmen” and possibly “Heroes”. Nobody is sure if it is in color or not, though. Based on the cheap cover price of $12.99 my guess is not but that’s just a guess.
Amazon has it available for pre-order, with a release date of January 12th.
Some explanation of the insidious attempts of Google to take over the world (insert Pinky and the Brain music):
FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP
Orphan Works and the Google Book Settlement / Part I
9.25.09
We’ve been asked for news about the Orphan Works bill. Last June Intellectual Property Watch warned that it would be back during the summer. And on June 11th, Senator Orrin Hatch confirmed his intent to reintroduce the bill. We immediately put out a notice to artists. But summer’s over and we’ve had no further news. So far, so good.
Of course Congress has had other priorities: the ongoing financial mess, the health care debate and – on the copyright front – the Google book search controversy. For those who haven’t followed the news about this Google assault on copyright, we’ll try to summarize it.
The World’s Largest Library (Or is it Bookstore?)
In 2004, Google announced its intent to digitize all of the world’s 80-100 million books – and to make most of them commercially available as orphaned works. The plan has been controversial since its inception.
Google began with the cooperation of several major libraries. The libraries gave Google access to their holdings. The problem is that libraries are libraries; they don’t own the copyrights to the books they hold. In short, they gave Google the rights to other people’s work. So far, Google has scanned over 10 million books.
In 2004, the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers sued Google for copyright infringement. Last October the parties settled. The resulting agreement is 141 pages long, with 15 appendices of 179 pages. The implications for copyright holders are not clear, but what the litigants would get is breathtaking. As Lynn Chu, a principal at Writers Representatives LLC, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2009:
“[I]f approved by the federal court, [it would] permit Google to post out-of-print books for reading, sales, institutional licensing, ad sales, and other publishing exploitations, by Google, online. The settlement gives the class-action attorneys $30 million; a new, quasi-judicial bureaucracy called the Book Rights Registry $35 million…and $45 million for owners infringed up to now — about $60 a title.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819841868261921.html
Google would keep just over a third of the profits generated by selling these books online. The rest would go to the Book Rights Registry run by publishers’ and authors’ representatives. In other words, 63% would go to the parties that sued Google. In theory, the Registry would attempt to locate the authors of orphaned works and pay them royalties. But as Ms. Chu points out, the parties that sued Google – and would therefore benefit from Google’s infringement – have themselves traded away other people’s rights in the bargain:
“No one elected these ‘class representatives’ to represent America’s tens of thousands of authors and publishers to convey their digital rights to Google. Nor are the interests of this so-called class identical.”
The US Department of Justice apparently agrees. Last Friday, it filed an objection to the settlement and advised the court to reject the settlement as written. On page 9 of their brief, the DOJ attorneys write:
“The structure of the Proposed Settlement itself, therefore, pits the interests of one part of the class (known rightsholders) against the interests of another part of the class (orphan works rightsholders). Google’s commercial use of orphan works will generate revenues, which will be deposited with the Registry. Any unclaimed revenues, however, will inure to the benefit of the Registry and its registered rightsholders. Thus, the Registry and its registered rightsholders will benefit at the expense of every rightsholder who fails to come forward to claim profits from Google’s commercial use of his or her work…
“The greater the economic exploitation of the works of unknown rightsholders by Google and the Registry, the stronger the incentive for known rightsholders to retain the unclaimed revenues for themselves.” [Emphasis added]
The US federal court was scheduled to hold a fairness hearing October 7. But over 400 objections from around the world have been filed by rightsholders, competitors to Google and (in addition to the US government) the governments of France and Germany. Yesterday we received news that the fairness hearing has been delayed.
The Google settlement has also been condemned by Marybeth Peters, Register of the US Copyright Office. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee last Wednesday, Ms. Peters stated that it would allow Google to “operate under reverse principles of copyright law,” adding “it could affect the exclusive rights of millions of copyright owners, in the United States and abroad, with respect to their abilities to control new products and new markets, for years and years to come.” http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat091009.html
We haven’t had much to say about this agreement because, with the notable exception of childrens’ book illustrations (which for purposes of the settlement are considered part of the text) the agreement doesn’t include visual art. Yet like the Orphan Works bill itself, the Google Book Settlement would be a radical change to copyright law.
Tomorrow we’ll examine some of the ways in which this settlement parallels the Orphan Works bill.
- Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership
I got a pleasant surprise in the mailbox yesterday… issue #4 of John Read‘s excellent Stay Tooned! magazine has arrived.
This issue is the “MAD” issue featuring profiles of eight different members of “The Usual Gang of Idiots”: Don “Duck” Edwing, Scott Nickel, Sergio Aragonés, myself, John Kovaleski, Paul Coker, Ted Rall and Jack Davis (listed in order of appearance in the issue). These profiles/interviews are extensive and full of fantastic info and great artwork.
It also features an intro article by longtime MAD editor Nick Meglin in which he calls me a bastard… but he means that in the nicest possible way of course. There are also other great articles including one about Don Martin by R.C. Harvey, a story about the road to comic strip syndication by “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” cartoonist John Hambrock, “Reflections of a Gag Writer” by Don Hagist, photos and details from last spring’s cartoonist’s USO trip to Germany and lots of other gems.
The substandard cover art is the only blemish of the issue.
As usual John has outdone himself. I’ve never heard anyone who has ever seen an issue of Stay Tooned! NOT rave about the content, the production, the enormous volume of articles and features and virtually every other aspect of the magazine. The only complaint I’ve ever heard is the $9.00 per issue price tag, but that has only come from people who have NOT seen the magazine. Anyone who has would agree it’s worth much more than the cover price.
Go order a copy today! Better yet, get a subscription. Stay Tooned! really is a worthy successor to Cartoonist Profiles.
Looks like I’ll have to cop out this week and post this rough pencil sketch of one of the projects I’m working on for the “sketch o’the week”. Yes, it’s another “workplace poster”. After looking at it again I think I’ll move the man down towards the bottom right just a little bit to better balance the composition. I should be able to share the finished artwork on Friday.
Yet another in a seemingly endless supply of time lapse videos from the infamous 1993 caricature demo reel that played in fine shopping mall caricatures locations the world over… um, in a few different states anyway.
This is an earlier caricature I did of Bill Cosby, which I replaced some years later with this much better one:
But… enjoy the video anyway. The guy who did the editing selected the music. Personally I would have gone with some generic jazz music with a Cosby drawing, but he went with the twanging country tune for the first bit. Go figure. The second tune selection is a bit better.
