Q: Norman Rockwell writes in his book Norman Rockwell, artist and illustrator )by Norman Rockwell & Thomas S. Buechner) how people would constantly write in to the Saturday Evening Post about the mistakes he made in his references. Do you get any of that kind of feedback? If so what is the biggest mistake you have made, if any?

A: I believe you are talking about “bloopers” like drawing six fingers on a hand or something similar, as opposed to mistakes in perspective or similar mechanical flaws… because if it’s the latter this will be a very long post.

Oh, I’ve made my share of dumb mistakes in some of my illustrations. In 99% of the cases it’s just being in too big a hurry and making quick changes without thinking things completely through. I’ve posted a few of them here in the past, and here are two of the ones that come to mind right away:

In the baseball scene above, I was supposed to draw two guys colliding in the outfield while the ball drops to the ground. In my haste to finish the piece I was thinking more about the interest of the colors than I was about the scene itself. The mistake? Two guys on the SAME TEAM would be wearing the SAME UNIFORM! D’oh! The client also did not catch it so it went to print as is.

In the scene above, I did a bunch of changes from the original sketch where I pasted in elements from one sketch to a second. During that process I switched the business woman’s legs around so her right knee was forward rather than her left as in the original sketch. The mistake? I didn’t change her left foot into a left foot, so she has TWO RIGHT FEET. D’oh! Client didn’t catch that one either, but one of my blog readers did, and the art got fixed in time for the printing!:

I’m sure there have been others but I’m not coming up with any right now from “professional” illustration work.

There have been a few doozies I’ve done when doing live caricature, though.

One of the drawings I often do with young teenage boys is the simple “showing off the bicep” pose where the kid holds up one arm to show a well defined but roughly walnut sized bicep muscle flexed. I drew one kid once in this pose who had come in and sat down while I was turned around giving change to my last customers. He was sitting in front of me when I turned about, and he was kind of short so I couldn’t see much past his neck due to the angle of my drawing board.  I did this pose on him, with his right arm flexed. His buddies behind me started laughing and told me to look closer. I rose up in my chair… the kid had NO RIGHT ARM. Missing from the deltoid down. Ooops.

Another time I was drawing a twelve year-old who had these lush, dark eyelashes, full red lips and thick, curly hair. The mom asked if I’d do a drawing with a tennis theme. I drew the subject in a cute tennis skirt delivering a backhand smash. I finished the drawing in color and handed it over, got paid and went on with the day. Later the mom came up and told me she just wanted to know how upset her SON was that I drew him in a skirt. Ooops. After that I would ask the kid’s name before committing to a specific sex in the drawing… of course whenever I was in doubt the name was always “Chris/Kris”, “Pat” or “Sean/Shaun”.

A few years ago at Valleyfair I was drawing a couple towards the end of a busy day, and I did one of the quickest and easiest of poses… the guy with his arm around the girl and giving the “thumbs up” as he looks at her. The couple and their friends watching were Hispanic and speaking Spanish so I had no idea what they were saying. As I got through drawing the bodies and started adding the color, the friends started laughing and saying all sorts of stuff to the guy. He starts laughing and then raises his hand up to show me… NO THUMB. Ooops.

That doesn’t even take into account the times I’ve mistakenly thought a dad and his adult daughter were a couple, that a woman was pregnant when she wasn’t (those are never pretty) or that what I thought were freckles were really zits.

Thanks to Micheal Garisek 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 Good News is that MAD artist extraordinaire Tom Bunk is having an exhibit of his “METAPHYSICAL QUANTOONS” in the Robert Mayer Zeigt Galerie in Frankfurt, Germany from April 12th – 30th. Check out the gallery’s website for a sneak peek preview.

The Bad News is that I do not live in Frankfurt, Germany.

For you lucky clods that do or live near enough for a road trip, you can see a whole bunch of Tom’s stunning color work in all their juicy goodness.

This just in from the Illustrator’s Partnership:

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS’ PARTNERSHIP

White House Seeks Artists’ Comments to Improve Copyright Protection

3.18.10

New Copyright Czar begins Joint Strategic Plan to Protect Intellectual Property

Victoria Espinel is the first U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC), also known as the Copyright Czar. Congress created IPEC by an Act of Congress. Ms. Espinel serves within the Executive Office of the President to coordinate with all the federal agencies that fight the infringement of intellectual property.

Ms. Espinel and her team are specifically tasked with formulating and implementing a Joint Strategic Plan to help protect the ingenuity and creativity of Americans by improving the U.S. Government’s protection of the rights of intellectual property owners.

Your input is requested.

The White House is inviting your public input and participation to shape an effective intellectual property enforcement strategy. Please respond with your written submissions regarding the costs to you, your business and the U.S. economy resulting from infringement of your intellectual property rights, both direct and indirect.

This will be a 2-part process. The first is to gather public recommendations by March 24. IPEC will then gather your input on the formulated plan.

Please be precise. Include your name, city, state, and what type of artist you are. Explain why copyright is critical to you as a commercial artist, how infringement affects you, and what the U.S. government can do to better protect the rights of American artists. If your submission is about your economic loss due to infringement of your copyrights you must clearly identify the methodology used to calculate your losses or otherwise validate your infringement and enforcement costs.

Your submission will be publicly posted. For this reason, please do not include in your comments information of a confidential nature, such as sensitive personal information or proprietary information.

Confidential disclosures- If you have confidential business information that would support your recommendation or that you believe would help the Government formulate an effective enforcement strategy, please let them know by contacting:

Thomas L. Stoll
Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator
(202) 395-1808

Deadline: Submissions must be received by Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at 5 p.m. EST.
Address: All submissions should be sent electronically via intellectualproperty@omb.eop.gov

Additional Background Reading:
White House Blog
Federal Register Notice Request

- Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner for the Board of the Illustrators’ Partnership

Yikes, that deadline is this coming Wednesday. The gist of this message is here is a chance to get your voice heard over how copyright infringement can damage your ability to earn a living as a creator of intellectual property, and the concerns you have. Considering the shady and misguided Orphan Works legislation some members of congress have been trying to sneak through the last few years, this is a chance to get the concerns of artists, writers and other creators out to people who might listen.

Artwork by Patrick McDonnell

The nominees for the divisional awards from the National Cartoonists Society are officially announced:

TELEVISION ANIMATION

• Kevin Deters – “Walt Disney Prep and Landing”
• Mike Gray – “The Infinite Goliath”
• Seth McFarlane – “Family Guy”

FEATURE ANIMATION

• Ronnie del Carmen – Storyboard Artist – “Up”
• Tomm Moore – Director – “The Secret of Kells”
• Barry Reynolds – Character Designer – “The Secret of Kells”

NEWSPAPER ILLUSTRATION

• Bob Rich
• Tom Richmond
• Robert Sanchuk

GAG CARTOONS

• Glenn McCoy
• VG Myers
• Dave Whamond

GREETING CARDS

• Glenn McCoy
• Kieran Meehan
• Debbie Tomassi

NEWSPAPER COMIC STRIPS

• John Hambrock – “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee”
• Wiley Miller – “Non Sequitur”
• Jerry Scott & Jim Borgman – “Zits”

NEWSPAPER PANEL CARTOONS

• Dave Blazek – “Loose Parts”
• Tony Carillo – “FMinus”
• Hilary Price – “Rhymes with Orange”

MAGAZINE FEATURE/ MAGAZINE ILLUSTRATION

• Ray Alma
• Anton Emdin
• Tom Richmond

BOOK ILLUSTRATION

• Lou Brooks – “Twimericks”
• Tom Richmond – “Bo Confidential”
• Dave Whamond – “My Think-A-Ma-Jink”

EDITORIAL CARTOONS

• Nick Anderson
• Rob Rogers
• John Sherffius

ADVERTISING ILLUSTRATION

• Steve Brodner
• Randall Enos
• Mort Gerberg

COMIC BOOKS

• Terry Moore – “Echo”
• Paul Pope – “Strange Adventures”
• JH Williams – “Detective Comics”

GRAPHIC NOVELS

• David Mazzucchelli – “Asterios Polyp”
• Seth – “George Sprott”
• David Small – “Stitches”

As previously announced, the nominees for The Reuben Award for “Cartoonist of the Year” are:

• Stephen Pastis
• Dan Piraro
• Richard Thompson

The winners will be announced at the 64th annual Reuben Awards on May 29th.

I am overwhelmed (and in fact in deep disbelief) to see that I am nominated in three different categories this year… surely there will be some sort of “hanging chad” controversy over it. Any nomination is of course a huge honor, and I am suitably humbled. Congratulations to all the nominees! You can see the list complete with links to images from many of the artists at the NCS website.

This week we continue our Sketch o’the Week ink wash caricature series countdown to the May 23rd finale of “LOST” with the fetching Evangeline Lilly AKA Kate Austen. Each week I am planning on doing one of these ink wash studies of one of the major LOST characters. That means nine more until the finale… or until I get bored with it. I’ll try and stay focused.

Speaking of cartoonists on TV, my buddy Stephen Silver was featured on the HGTV show “The Antonio Treatment” recently.

I was the subject of a short piece on the weekend edition of the FOX9 newscast here in the Twins Cities:

It was flattering to be contacted by the station and have them ask if I’d do this. It’s too bad that MAD hadn’t announced it’s switch to bimonthly before they did the final editing. It’s also unfortunate that my braces make it sound like I have a worse lisp than The Music Man’s Winthrop Paroo.

Some of the quotes I give seem odd because the question the reporter asked me doesn’t proceed them. For example, the last comment I make about getting all my kids graduated and out of the house was in answer to the question “are you ever going to grow up?” to which my full response was “I hope not. If I can get all my kids out of the house and graduated without growing up I should be safe.”

Q: When you draw crowd scenes, are all of the people who make up the people in the crowd faces you doodle out of your imagination, or do you often fit in friends/family/random people you see on the street?

A: I often talk here about how much I’ve learned working for the folks at MAD, and especially from MAD art director Sam Viviano. I can’t even begin to list all of the important things he’s taught me over the years in art directing what I turn in for the magazine. However one particular bit of wisdom he imparted on me early on when I was trying to break into MAD sticks with me as one of the most impactful things I’ve ever learned. Sam was making observations about my early work, and he noticed that there was a big difference between the real people I was drawing caricatures of and the people that were just background or secondary characters. He pointed out how easy it was to tell the difference in the drawings, and how cartoony and odd the “other” people looked compared to the caricatures of real people. He said I should strive to make my secondary characters look as detailed and full of life as the caricatured people look.

There was only one way I knew to do that… use real people as the basis of all those secondary characters.

So, I started throwing my family and friends into my MAD parodies as background or supporting characters. Here are a few examples:

The four kids behind Harry and Neville are my kids circa 2001.

The couples above in the yellow and red shirts from the parody of “Trading
Spaces” are my neighbors.

The guy on the right is my friend, Illustrator James Hungaski, who I drew
as the straight guy in the parody of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”

The two guys oogling Mischa Barton are Joe and Luke McGarry, the sons of my
friend Steve McGarry, a terrific cartoonist and former NCS president. The parody
is of “The O.C”, and the McGarry’s live in Orange County.

The pointing cop here is my brother-in-law Joe Voss.

There are a LOT more examples of my putting in people I know for fun… too many to list here.

When I don’t want to take the time to get reference and draw a specific someone I will draw “generic” people but I still usually base them loosely on some reference of some kind. In my studio I have a dozen or so catalogs full of stock photos and model head shots. I will often page through those just to get a type and look of someone specific to use as a basis for a character. Things like head shapes, hairstyles and other specific features are easy to end up drawing too similarly unless you can get some specific and different samples in your head. I don’t draw caricatures per se of these people, in fact I will use bits of one and bits from another, and almost always draw them in a totally different pose and with a different expression than the typical smiling head shot gives me. It’s the individuality of the person I am trying to glean from the reference.

The end result (hopefully) is that all the characters I draw have a similar feel of completeness and individuality about them.

Thanks to Ed Placencia 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!

This illustration I did for MAD‘s website is now available to download in high res in the MAD Web Download Gallery. Also just posted, the “Tiger Cheat” and “Avatar 2: Jersey Shore” parody posters and a special New York Times MAD Fold-in crossword puzzle.

Someone recently posted a comment mentioning that they are used to my “effusive praise of other artists” to which I replied “if it seems I only effusively praise other artists that is because I only mention artists who work I truly admire… ones I think suck I just don’t talk about. My mom always said, “If you can’t say anything nice…””

Too true. I don’t dislike everything I do not take the time to post about… far from it. But I do wholeheartedly love and admire that which I do take the time to post about.

Like the comic strip “LIO“.

I’m friends with LIO and “Heart of the City” creator Mark Tatulli, but that has nothing to do with my post today. While “Heart of the City” is a solid strip which I very much enjoy, Mark moved up about 10 levels in my (admittedly meager) book when he started LIO. I’m a sucker for pantomime cartooning, and LIO is one of those strips that consistently makes me smile or laugh out loud with nary a word used. Some cartoonists have a schtick or formula they stick close to and are successful with… a single voice if you will. Mark shows how creativity can branch out into another realm and bottle the lightning all over again from a totally different storm. LIO is as different from HEART as apples and oranges, but Mark wields the pen with great prowess in both strips.

Last year “LIO” won a divisional award from the National Cartoonist Society for best comic strip, and well deserved in my opinion. It’s a great strip and well worth reading either in your local paper or online.