Once again, the National Cartoonists Society Foundation will soon be bestowing some lucky and talented young student of cartooning the Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship, an award of both prestige and plenty of dough for the recipient’s college education in memory of the late King Features cartoon editor:
From the NCSF Website:
Jay Kennedy Scholarship
The annual Jay Kennedy Scholarship, in memory of the late King Features editor, was funded by an initial $100,000 grant from the Hearst Foundation/King Features Syndicate and additional generous donations from Jerry Scott, Jim Borgman, Patrick McDonnell and many other prominent cartoonists. Submissions are adjudicated by a panel of top cartoonists and an award is given to the best college cartoonist. The recipient is feted at the annual NCS Reuben Awards Convention attended by many of the world’s leading cartoonists.
Applicants must be college students in the United States, Canada or Mexico that will be in their Junior or Senior year of college during the 2010-2011 academic year. Applicants do not have to be art majors to be eligible for this scholarship.
Along with a completed entry form, applicants are required to send 8 samples of their own cartooning artwork (copies only); noting if and where the work has been published, either in print or on the web. (See application for details.) DO NOT send original artwork.
DEADLINE: ENTRIES MUST BE POSTMARKED BY FEBRUARY 12, 2010
The applications will be judged by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF) and the number of scholarships given out and their amounts will be at the discretion of the NCSF.
I served on the board of the NCSF for four years, and while I am no longer part of those in charge the scholarship is a great program and I will continue to promote it as much as I can. I am proud to say that last year’s recipient, Chris Houghton, found out about the scholarship through The MAD Blog and applied…. how cool is that!
Having served on the scholarship committee, I do not envy those doing that job this year their decision. There was a lot of deserving and fantastically talented applicants in the last two years, and it was very hard to choose a single winner.
As you can see above, the deadline for submission is February 12th… so don’t procrastinate! Get that application and send it your artwork ASAP.
Here’s an interesting example of some of the strange jobs that come your way when you are a freelance illustrator.
I have never given a thought to doing greeting cards. They are an art form unto themselves, blending art, writing, humor and context to make cards that resonate with buyers. Cartoonists like Sandra Boynton and Oliver Christianson (aka “Revilo”) are amazing talents. It’s one of those areas of cartooning I didn’t think my skills lent themselves to.
My friend and fellow member of the “Usual Gang of Idiots” John Kovaleski disagreed. He was (at the time) working as a creative director at Marian Heath Greeting Cards and the company was trying to come up with a line of political themed greeting cards. I was one of a number of cartoonists he tapped to come up with some ideas and art for possible political greeting cards. He didn’t need finished cards, but rather concept/gags with basic ideas on the art. So I used some sketches and bits of art I had laying about or had used for parts of other jobs to show my ideas with the intention of redoing the artwork to make it more appropriate if they picked up any of the concepts. This happened in early 2007, so no Obama yet.
The process of doing greeting cards is similar to that of doing gag cartoons. Most of them are done by the artist/writer doing a bunch of them and submitting to a company. That company then looks them over and decides if they want to buy the rights to any of them. In that manner you can imagine that for every greeting card you see on the card racks at the store there are a thousand or so that were never made.
What I discovered during the Great Greeting Card Experiment was that:
My initial instincts were right, I am no good at greeting cards, and
Most of my cards belonged in the “thousand or so that were never made” category.
The one with Cheney at the top of this post was actually printed as part of their political line, but they redid the caption. I don’t have any of the actual cards, and I can’t remember the exact wording they used, but it was something similar.
Here are a bunch of the rejects:
These are elements from a MAD job
This was a sketch for another project
Not too many people remember Howard Dean’s “Screamgate”
They asked to do some odd events… this was as odd as I could come up with.
This was supposed to be making fun of how boring Gore is…
This was a quick sketch I did on the Cintiq… like 4 minutes
This Bush was part of a magazine cover job that never got printed.
Q: A bunch of us were at a live caricature gig lately, complaining about how hard it is to juggle all of our different freelance projects. How do YOU do it? I know there is no “typical” day in the life of a freelance cartoonist, but how do you juggle your administrative duties with your caricature venues (and all the traveling involved), with your freelance career? All this, in addition to all the public appearances you make, in addition to making blog posts everyday!
A: I get this question a lot whenever I do any kind of speaking engagement or meet up with other artists who frequent my blog and/or are familiar with my work. They are various forms of the same basic question?
“How do you find the time to do everything?”
The answer is pretty simple. I don’t have a life.
I’m kidding. That’s far from the truth. Actually there are a lot of things that contribute to making my schedule and workload manageable.
First and foremost, I am given a lot more credit for being productive than I deserve. If you’ve ever burst into my studio to see me playing solitaire or surfing websites while a half inked illustration is gathering dust on my board, you’d be a little less inclined to think I am a workaholic. I get behind. I procrastinate. I get distracted… just like most people.
That said, here are the things I try and do to keep my productivity as high as possible:
I break up my deadlines into several little deadlines- It’s easier to break up a job into incremental goals rather than saying “I’m going to have this whole thing done in three days!”. If your only goal is the final result, then the deadline for that result will be too far away and it will be easy to say “I’ll take this afternoon off and then catch up tomorrow”. Setting short goals for stages of a job keeps you focused, and will maintain a general sense of urgency that I find I need to keep on task.
I set reasonable short term goals- Along the same line of thought as breaking up your jobs into stages, it’s important to set up these stages and goals to be realistically attainable. I map out in my head what I need to accomplish for a given day, and then I try hard not to allow myself to stop for the day until I have accomplished them. The trick is to make them realistic… It’s easy to say “I’m going to completely color four MAD pages today” but when it’s an almost superhuman feat to get two colored, expecting to get four colored is not realistic. If you set realistic goals you don’t get that overwhelmed feeling half way through the day that might cause you to say “this is hopeless, I’m going to the movies”. You also feel a sense of accomplishment when you hit that goal, which feeds into more enthusiasm for the next day instead of starting out the next day feeling like you have already failed.
I remember to reward myself- Promise yourself some kind of reward for hitting your goal for the day. Maybe it’s watching that movie that just came in the mail from Netflix. Maybe it’s a big glass of wine and the next chapter in the book you’re reading. Whatever. It doesn’t have to be a big thing, but it should be something you only get to do if you hit your goal.
I keep my priorities straight- Work is not everything. Don’t miss kid’s plays and shows, family night out, etc. because you fell behind on your job. Do those things and then deal with it back in the studio. Jobs come and go but some moments in your life only happen once. Don’t miss them.
I try and minimize distractions- If it’s crunch time on a job I will turn off my computer (or unplug my internet connection if I am using it for the job), unplug the telephone… whatever. If I am at a certain stage of a job where I do not have to be tethered to the studio, like when I am doing conceptual sketches, leaving the studio and going to some remote place like a quiet coffeeshop or such is a great way to keep on task. I have gotten many a sketch done while sitting at one of my caricature locations on a very slow day.
Those are the principal things I do to try and stay as productive as possible.
The original question was how do I find the time to post on this blog everyday, do the administrative things with the business, travel, etc? Those are just other tasks that need time to do, so I work them in to my daily goals and schedule. If I know I am going to be going on a trip, I step up my schedule to get things done before leaving or figure out how I can accomplish things on the trip.
As far as finding the time, that isn’t really too hard for me. I don’t watch TV. I don’t play sports. I don’t have any time consuming hobbies or go out to the bars on weekends. My free time is spend with my family doing what families do, watching my kids perform in their shows, listening to their choir concerts, taking The Lovely Anna out on date night… that kind of thing. Not watching TV is probably the biggest timesaver. The only show I watch is LOST and since it’s two or three years in between #@&^%! seasons that’s not an issue.
The bottom line is I love to do the things I do, and that makes it easy to “find the time” to do them.
Thanks to Bill White 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!
If you’ve never watched any of cartoonist Tom Gammill‘s “How to Draw” video shorts, you are in for a treat. They are clever, funny and always entertaining. As of this writing there are two dozen installments… the video above is one my favorites. You can check them all out here.
Back in October of 1971, National Lampoon published a scathing parody of MAD that is today the stuff of legend. National Lampoon, like most humor magazines of that time (and a lot of humor period over the next several decades) owed a lot to MAD and its artists and writers were obviously heavily influenced by the magazine. As a result the parody, while being pretty brutal and pulling no punches, seemed much more of a needling with love by a close relative than a bitter attack. The staff of MAD, as the story goes, were delighted with it. National Lampoon was always more original and had more of its own voice than most of the other non-MAD humor magazines of those days… it was not a knock off of MAD so much as it was a cousin that grew in a different direction and established much more of its own voice… albeit it using a lot more vulgar language.
The blog Easily Mused has scanned in and posted the entire parody from National Lampoon #147…. I’m sure the lawyers of whoever owns the rights to NL will be in touch with them soon but in the meantime you can enjoy what is a great piece of humorous comic history.
I’m working on a very different project right now, designing political characters to be used as the basis of some 3D animation for a documentary film. This is WAY outside my comfort zone. You might think that since I draw caricatures of the same actors over and over in a MAD parody that it wouldn’t be that hard for me to draw a “turn around” of a caricature of someone. Not so. It’s a totally different animal to design a caricature that when rotated on an axis remains consistent in it’s proportions and exaggerations.
The first character I was told to work on was former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. I got so frustrated trying to get it to work that I eventually decided to approach it from an entirely different angle… doing a sculpture of the caricature to use as the basis of my design.
I’m not much of a sculptor, but I didn’t need a finished, polished result. All I needed was a basic construct of the face in caricature that I could use as a model for my character design. So, I went out and bought my first box of Super Sculpy and this is the result:
Again… very rough basic construct. Not surprisingly, all I could think about as I was working on this was the great Spitting Image puppet that was seen on that show and also the Genesis video “Land of Confusion”. I went out of my way NOT to look that up on the internet and only work from photos of Reagan, but looking after the fact I can see the influence from memory.
Here are some of the roughs of the heads only of the animated character I am working up:
The documentary won’t be out for a long time, but it should be fun to work on. I’m doing 11 characters in all.
I did this quick study of Justin Timberlake from a picture out of an entertainment magazine that really caught my eye… mostly the interesting figure captured at a moment of balanced motion.
Yep, here’s yet another time lapse “live caricature” style example from my 1993 demo video… this time of Rhea Perlman, one of the cast of the legendary sitcom “Cheers”.
Also regular blog readers will be happy to know I am almost to the end of that demo reel.
Q: My question is about the application of color. I’ve already seen your tutorials about coloring, but I’d like to know how to use the right color for each kind of illustration you make. How do you make your color selections? How do you know what’s the right color to use? Do you do it intuitively or is it pre-meditated?
A: I am definitely the wrong guy to ask this question. In my opinion my color use skills are not very good, and certainly not very thought out. What (very) little I know about color I picked up on my own and never studied any color theory or application anywhere.
People that know what they are doing with color understand that “pure” or “primary” color is bad. In real life, the colors we see are never pure colors, but are always influenced by the colors and light about them. A red ball sitting on a blue floor will have elements of each other on their surfaces because of the light that reflects off each and onto the other, and the shadows that are cast also cause color shifts. Color is caused by objects reflecting different wavelengths of light off their surfaces, and that light can get changed by the various objects it comes into contact with. Therefore an environment tends to have an overall color cast, where the colors are pushed towards a common color. “Monochromatic” is a term that means something that is all in shades of one color… I don’t mean that. I mean having all colors incorporate a hint of a single overall color that creates a cohesive feel.
Painters can create this effect in several ways, one of which is to simply incorporate the colors of surrounding objects into the colors of that which they surround. Another method is to use a “limited palette”, where they might have only two or three colors of pigment and force themselves to paint their image with only combination of those colors. MAD Magazine genius Harvey Kurtzman used a variation of an old painter’s trick called an “underpainting”, where he would paint the entire area he was coloring with a layer of color… say yellow… then would paint on top of that color. The end result was an image with an overall warm, yellow feel but not monochromatic. Not paying attention to this concept (which I rarely do) is called using “local” color… meaning the natural color of an object unmodified by the light, shadow or any other influence from around it. I use a lot of local color in my illustrations…. I like the bright look and it works well with my cartoony style.
Color has a lot of complexities to it, but I take a very simple approach. I think of color in terms of depth and perspective. The more saturated the color, the more it “comes forward” in the image, and the less saturated the father back it seems. Likewise with warm versus cool colors. Warm colors advance while cool colors recede. Here’s an example from last years “Who’s thinking What at the Obama Inauguration”. I added increasing levels of blue casting to the colors the farther back the crowd goes. The colors at the bottom of this image are more saturated and less blue than those at the top:
Those are really the only rules I keep in mind when doing color, otherwise I select colors based on the subject matter and environments I am coloring. Sometimes what you are coloring dictates the type of color you should use. For example, some years ago I did a parody of the film “Van Helsing” for MAD. If you are unfortunate enough to watch the movie (yeah, it’s that bad) you might notice that there is very little color in it. They went for a drab and gray color palette to match the sullen Transylvania countryside in winter. I therefore leached much of the color out of even the skin tones in my art to give it the same effect:
At other times I might punch up the color to be more garish than usual, if I am doing something that demands it, like my MAD parody of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”… lots of color in this show with their decorating makeovers and clothes:
Mostly, though, I just pick colors to make things pop out that I want to pop out and to make things recede that are less important. Simplistic, I know, but I’m no painter.
Well, I managed to type a lot of words about something I don’t know much about. I’d seek knowledge about use of color from books or resources on painting. Color theory applies to any medium.
Thanks to Angel Flores from Mexico City 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!
