Q: You’re making a living with your artistic skills. From that vantage point, what art skills would you hope would be taught to students (12-15 years old) with similar cartooning / illustration aspirations for their livelihood?
A: At the age you cite there is no specific set of skills or instruction that I feel would be of direct benefit to an aspiring cartoonist/illustrator. At that point it’s all about being exposed to as much art, illustration and inspiration as possible and to experiment with various mediums… and of course to draw.
As a teenager an artist is still very much a blank canvas and is just beginning to develop their artistic sensibilities and their “eye” for seeing the world. I remember when I was that age I struggled to find that inspiration because I went to a small town school where the art program was very low on the educational priority scale. I didn’t have access to much in the way of any kind of art, nor was I challenged much. In fact our art teacher was also the school counselor, and probably an art teacher by default. The one thing he did do for me was to force me to work in different mediums, not letting me just do what I was comfortable doing. That was a great help to me.
Whenever I work with a young kid interested in becoming a working artist I stress two things: the importance of drawing anything and everything, and looking at the work of lots of other artists.
The importance of the former is obvious. Lots of kids love drawing their favorite things, but it’s important to draw life itself rather than one particular, albeit interesting, part of life. Kids that show me a book full of manga drawings of nothing but teenagers jumping around with swords make me cringe. I always ask them if they can draw a chair and a lamp next to the figure and make it look like that figure could sit down in that chair should it suddenly come to animated life. Most will not even attempt it and of those that do attempt it most can’t do it. My point to them is that it’s easy to learn to draw something like an action figure… it’s tough to draw the rest of the world around it convincingly. It’s your skills illustrating the rest of the world that gets you sustained work.
Things like composition, environments and storytelling are as or more important to doing effective cartooning and illustration than just being able to draw scary monsters or caricatured heads. Learning and studying that kind of thing goes a long way to developing a foundation for effective illustration and cartooning. Drawing from life, objects, people, buildings, furniture, machines… drawing these things and placing them in environments develops an artist’s sense of composition and design.
The second thing, looking at the work of lots of other artists, is also important at this young stage. You never know what will resonate with a young artist and will stick with them as they develop their work. I’m not talking about seeing and aping someone’s style, I mean how looking at and seeing the world through another artist’s eyes helps open your own eyes to things you may not have seen or noticed before. A comic strip cartoonist might get as much out of looking at a Maxfield Parrish as they would looking at a Peanuts strip, even if one doesn’t seem to directly apply to what they do or end up doing. For example looking at the work of Norman Rockwell taught me, among many other things, how much dynamic and exaggerated human expression conveys the story of a given illustration. Exposure to the work of others opens a young artist’s mind and inspires them.
The only real, tangible thing I would suggest to teach to a young artist is how to use the computer as a tool for their art. This is already an essential thing today, for a professional expecting to break into the business in 10 years or so it will be beyond essential.
Thanks to John Calvin 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!
Hot on the heels of the big Disney buys Marvel news was this week’s announcement of the restructuring of DC Comics into DC Entertainment Inc. which was quickly followed by DC publisher Paul Levitz stepping down from the head job and “transitioning” to a full time writer, editor and consultant. No word on who will be “transitioning” in. Diane Nelson, who handled the Harry Potter marketing for Warner Bros. was named the head of the new DC Entertainment Inc. I have gotten a number of e-mails asking me “how does this affect MAD“?
My answer: I have no idea.
I have no idea what is going on with MAD these days. Freelancers are hardly privy to the inner workings of management, corporate parent involvement, budgeting, etc. We get assigned to do jobs, we do them, we get paid, they get published. That last sentence is still accurate even though it is taken place considerably less frequently than it used to.
This restructuring move might be good, bad or indifferent. I suppose the only thing that could be worse for MAD than it’s present predicament (having had it’s other titles discontinued and being cut down to quarterly publication), would be the complete cancellation of the magazine. On the other hand, maybe the new DC Entertainment Inc. management will want to try and revitalize the brand and move it into other media somehow, which could revive the magazine or at least increase it’s budget and the marketing muscle behind it. On still another hand it might be that MAD will be largely ignored to either continue on as is or solve it’s own issues internally somehow.
Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune has a special pull-out section entitled “2009 Vikings Season Preview” that features two full page illustrations I did of Brett Favre and company. One is on the front of the section and one on the back, each is meant as a “cover” but obviously with different possible messages.
The job was to illustrate two extreme scenarios of the outcome of the “Brett Favre” experiment at quarterback. They wanted not only to convey Favre as a savior in one and as a failure in the other, but also to show how you can flip the section over to see the opposite possibility.
Here’s some of the stages of the project:
Pencil Roughs
This project didn’t need any thumbnails or multiple conceptual drawings as it was pretty well described. The above rough sketches were to establish the basic layout and composition, gags, etc. The only client comments were they wanted to make running back Adrian Peterson more involved.
Final Pencils
Tighter pencil drawings on the final board with art direction incorporated. The text is added via PhotoShop.
Inks
Final Art
I considered doing my colored line technique on this but elected to go with the line and color instead as newsprint tends to make things murky and the hard lines would keep the illustrations sharper.
As I have mentioned previously I’ll be doing a speaking presentation at 7:30 tonight at the 40 Club and Convention Center in Aitkin, MN in conjunction with the “What’s So Funny? A Celebration of Cartooning!” art show at the nearby Jaques Art Center.
My talk will feature a slideshow presentation of a bunch of samples of my work, a step-by-step of a typical MAD Magazine movie parody job and a few other surprises, as well as a Q&A at the end. The entry fee is a donation to the local food shelf or one to the Art Center. I’ll also be signing autographs after the talk, free if you bring something for me to sign otherwise they are selling copies of my black and white inkedself caricature for $2.00, proceeds also going to the Jaques Art Center. I’ll try and get some pictures.
Of more interest is probably the art show itself, which runs through Oct. 3rd. It features a lot of Minnesota cartoonists:
• Duane Barnhart – Contributor to the AITKIN INDEPENDENT AGE, SATURDAY EVENING POST
• Jim Bertram – Contributor to the WALL STREET JOURNAL, award winning editorial cartoonist
• Ed Fischer – Award winning editorial cartoonist – author of many regional humor books
• Carl W. Gawboy – Cartoonist, book author, illustrator IN WITH THE FINN CROWD
• David Gillette – Emmy Award winning cartoonist for TWIN CITIES PUBLIC TELEVISION (TPT)
• Dan Jurgens – Award winning comic book artist and writer SUPERMAN COMICS, others
• Dave Kirwan – advertising cartoonist, creator of syndicated comic strip ALIENS
• Scott Klingelhofer – advertising illustrator, cartoonist, art director for MELLO SMELLO
• Chris Monroe – Award winning book illustrator MONKEY WITH A TOOL BELT, draws VIOLET DAYS cartoon
• Dave Phipps – Panel cartoonist, specializing in advertising and promotion
• Tom Richmond – Moi
• Scott Rolfs – Comic book artist, book illustrator, advertising cartoonist
• Joel Seibel – Emmy Award winning animator and storyboard artist. Draws SKEETER TALES
• Julia Suits – Contributor to NEW YORKER MAGAZINE, nationally syndicated caricaturist
• Jackie Urbanovic – NEW YORK TIMES best selling children’s book author, illustrator
• Jerry Van Amerongen – Award winning syndicated daily cartoonist. Draws BALLARD STREET
Check out their bios here. I am looking forward to seeing both the show and the small town beauty of Aitkin… and the fall colors are beginning to start this time of year.
In honor of the release of a ton of remastered Beatles albums on CD and the video game “The Beatles: Rock Band” this week’s sketch subject is the late John Lennon. Lennon is probably the most elusive of the Fab Four to try and caricature. His look changed a lot over the years, and different angles of his face seemed to reveal different and sometimes opposing observations. Was his face long and thin, or did it have a lot of roundness and baby fat to it? His nose is long and bony, but did not dominate his face. Was his chin prominent or understated?
I’m a big Beatles fan and long ago transferred all the Beatles albums from CD to my iPod so I could listen to their complete (or almost complete) library of music when working in the studio without a lot of tedious CD shuffling. One of these days I will have to do a group caricature of the band.
This is a holiday that you will find on no official calendar, but it’s one all seasonal theme park caricaturists adore. Read that last link if you don’t understand… you need to spend at least one entire summer sweating out on the midway drawing endless lines of snot nosed kids, vain teenagers, drunk couples and surly art critics in order to get it fully. As a theme park concession owner, that goes double for me. Yesterday I was ultimately responsible for 12 art concession locations in three states with a combined work force of about 60 artists. Today… Nada. Nothing. Zero. well… one guy drawing at Union Station in St. Louis, but that barely counts.
Okay, it doesn’t mean as much to me these days as I have not drawn 5-6 days a week all summer in the theme parks for a long time now… but there is still a great feeling of relief from responsibility on this day. Back when I did to the full time drawing thing, I would go out to Valleyfair, the theme park I drew at all summer, on the day after Labor Day. I’d go to the chair I always drew in and sit there with a book for an hour or two. The eerie quiet… with no rumble of roller coasters, no screaming kids, no endless stupid questions, no recycling soundtracks and no smells of fermenting soda in the trash cans was always indescribably healing.
These days I don’t need that quiet time, but I try to enjoy the day nonetheless.
If I had to credit one thing for being the reason for my getting interested in comics, cartooning etc. as a kid it would have to be the 60′s Batman TV show. It was in early reruns when I was a little kid, my having been born in 1966 the year it was first on prime-time television. Like so many kids of that era, I spent a lot of time running around the neighborhood with an old bath towel pinned around my neck and a cardboard batarang in my hand…
The difference is I still run around the neighborhood occasionally with a cape and a batarang, but I’ve upgraded from the bath towel…
Anyway, writer extraordinaire Mark Evanier posted a little video gem on his blog featuring this public service announcement that I remember from back in 1972, featuring the cast of Batman… or so I thought:
At the time it was on TV, I thought that Batman seemed a little “off”, but I still thought it was him. Turns out it wasn’t Adam West at all, but actor, cartoonist and caricature artist Dick Gautier. Dick is a multitalented guy, but I didn’t know how good of an impressionist he was. He does a pretty convincing Adam West imitation here.
Dick is also a talented cartoonist, and I have his 1995 book Drawing and Cartooning 1,001 Caricatures, which is a pretty good book on caricature. Turns out he was also Batman, which raises him in my estimation by a considerable degree.
Q: How do you envisage the future for caricature? Do you see it moving a lot more towards manipulating photographs or do you think there will always be a place for the conventional hand-drawn approach?
A: One of the beautiful things about caricature is that it is a very personal thing. An artist’s caricature of a subject is his or her personal interpretation of that individual… every caricature has a little bit of the artist in it. It’s impossible to completely disassociate yourself from the caricature you draw, because without your personal observations and interpretations it’s not a caricature, it’s a portrait. Given that there will never be a computer program that automatically generates a real caricature. You cannot remove the artist from the equation.
That’s not to say that computer software might not take the DRAWING out of the equation someday.
Right now there are programs and tools that allow a user to manipulate a face and make it into something resembling a caricature. “Liquify” is a tool in PhotoShop that lets you push and pull features about in a photograph. I’ve never used it but I’ve seen the results and in most cases it makes the face look like it’s made of wax and has been sitting too close to the oven. Eventually a program might be written that will allow a user to take the individual features of the face, change their relationships by moving them about, and then the software with “render” the results so the structure, skin, hair, etc. all are recreated seamlessly to make a convincing caricatured face. That won’t make it a program that will do an automatic caricature, however. There is still the need for a human to impose their personal observations and interpretations on the subject, but it would eliminate that human’s need to be able to draw. That is the sad part of it.
There are already artists out there doing computer assisted caricature images. Here’s an example from the cover of MAD back in 2003:
These are photos manipulated on the computer to create a caricature of sorts. Personally I don’t think much of the results, but an artist still had to make decisions on what to do with each face… bigger jaw, smaller eyes, bigger forehead, etc. For what it’s worth I’ve never heard a single fan of MAD say they did anything but loathe this cover. MAD never did another photo manipulation cover again, although they did one for MAD Kids and there has occasionally been photo-caricatures used as spots in the magazine. You see them here are there.
Every since the first computers were made there has been debate about if and when humans would become obsolete. When will computers be able to do everything humans can do, better and faster? I think while the answer might not be “never” it is certainly a long, long, long way off. Computers, for all their technology and advancement, are still a long way from being as smart as a human brain. You need only look as far as the simple and humble “spam filter” to see that. The spam filter on my computer catches about 90% of spam e-mails, but 10% still creep through. Virtually any human being, however, can take one look at an e-mail and instantly tell if it’s a real message from someone or a spam/ad. They would score 100%, yet a computer is still incapable of that bit of intuition. Hence it cannot caricature.
To get back to your original question, while I think that you may see computer manipulated photos (done by digital artists) occasionally used in place of caricature illustrations, I do not think they will ever replace the hand drawn/painted/illustrated caricature. Art is art and photos are photos, and there will always be a need (and market) for humans to see and enjoy real art created by a real artist.
Thanks to Paul “Hutch” Hutchinson 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!
An alert e-mailer sent me this link to an online seller offering this “collector stamp sheet” from the Democratic Republic of Congo:
… which is a rip off of this VERY old park sample of Scully and Mulder from “The X-Files” that I had on my original website back in 1996:
Actually I’ve known about these Congo stamps for years. They surfaced around 2000 or so and featured about half a dozen of my caricature samples, apparently taken from my website, as well as caricatures by a number of other artists. There was a small country in Russia that did the same thing. Apparently there is nothing that can be legally done about it, and these same countries issued photo stamps featuring Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and other celebrities who’s estates are famous for litigating infringement of their rights of publicity. Interesting to think there might have been letters mailed in the Congo with some caricature of mine as a stamp.
You might think that was the most bizarre case of copyright infringement of my work I’ve ever seen… but you’d be wrong.
Back in the summer of 1999 I was eating breakfast one morning before I went into the theme park for another day of drawing live caricatures when I got a call from my father-in-law. He told me to open the morning paper and look at the local variety section. I grabbed our copy of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and paged through the section in question and was dumbfounded as to what I saw.
Earlier that year our new governor had been sworn in- Jesse “The Body” Ventura, and the press was having a field day with it. Every chance they got to do some piece of weirdness involving Ventura they jumped all over it. In this issue they did a story about Jesse’s intense popularity with the younger generation of voters, and there was a huge picture of someone’s shoulder sporting a Jesse Ventura tattoo that was an exact copy of this park sample of mine:
Yes, that’s right… a real tattoo. Someone had bought a copy of this drawing at Valleyfair (samples occasionally sell off the wall and I have to redraw them later), brought it to a tattoo artist and had them permanently ink it on their shoulder. No mention of that in the story of course.
The most bizarre part was that since this drawing is cropped off on the bottom, the tattoo artist improvised by adding feet to Jesse, and gave him huge, Bozo clown feet. I mean giant bubble feet. It looked ridiculous… I mean even more ridiculous than having a caricature of Jesse Ventura tattooed on your shoulder in the first place.
That one is the all time champ of weirdness featuring copyright infringement of my work.
The deadline for early discounted registration for the International Society of Caricature Artists annual convention is coming up fast on Sept. 15th. There is a substantial discount for both ISCA members and the special non-member “MAD Seminar Only” option.
On or Before September 15th:
Members- $165
Member guests- $100 each
Non- Member “Seminar Only”- $99
After September 15th:
Members- $250
Member guests- $100 each
Non- Member “Seminar Only”- $125
This will be a great event. It’s rare that this many MAD contributors get together to speak at the same time, and very rare to see so many of the “newer” members of the Usual Gang of Idiots featured.
