While visiting the theme parks here in Orlando this week I got the above idea for a possible promotion Disney could do for the upcoming “Cars 2″ movie by modifying their motorized rental scooters. Something tells me not to bother submitting it to Disney World for consideration…

One of the things that director Ray Griggs wanted me to do for the animation segments in his movie “I Want Your Money” was to add in some MAD style background gags. One of the gags was making fun of the fact that Obama has a pop culture celebrity image like that of no other president and is perceived as playing up to it. Thus I had some fun putting his face or head on recognizable pieces of famous art or awards. You can spot a couple of them in this picture, including CG versions of some of the ideas I suggested in that vein like an Obama/Oscar award, Obama on the Heisman Trophy and a Superman/Obama figure:

These images I whipped up super fast for the animators to add into the Oval Office environment… .

I had very limited time to do these, so I was not able to match the look of the different techniques more than perfunctorily. My favorite is the Picasso “Old Man with Guitar” send up. Sharp eyed MAD fans might notice a few of these made it into the background of one of the panels of “The Wizard of O” in MAD #505 along with an Obama/David statue and the Obama/Caesar bust to illustrate the same gag.

What the ?!? Yes, this time I’m off to Orlando and the House of Mouse with the family for a little vacation.

I know I promised a report on last weekend’s Festival of Cartoon Art at OSU in Columbus, OH, but as I was forced to leave a day early due to a couple of emergency jobs coming in I could not pass up, I barely got to experience any of it. In fact, I only got to hear the presentations of Paul Levitz, James Sturm and Dan Piraro and hang out with some cartoonists pals for two nights, so I will leave the reporting to those who really got to experience the weekend right… I’d suggest visiting The Daily Cartoonist for the complete rundown. The little bit I did get to see was fantastic and I was very upset at having to miss out on the Saturday speakers and festivities. Next time…

Q: I Really love your work, especially the detail you put in. Your pictures are never taken in at a glance – there is something interesting going on right into the corners. So I have a question about your attention to detail. Obviously it’s important for caricatures that the details are as accurate a depiction as necessary to make the image recognizable, but how important is it to you that the details of the less essential elements in a scene are similarly as accurate? If you draw a car in the background do you like the car to be recognizably a Toyota or a Ford if all that is necessary is it be a car?

A: First off, thanks for the kind words about my work… I’m very glad you enjoy it. Now, on to your question…

I’ve learned an awful lot about illustration and cartooning working for MAD, but if someone was to ask me the single most important piece of advice I’ve ever gotten from anyone on cartooning/illustration, the answer would be this very simple but crucial bit of wisdom I got from MAD art director Sam Viviano:

“Your background elements should look as convincing as your foreground elements.”

I’m actually paraphrasing there, because Sam never says anything in one sentence, but that is essentially the point he was conveying. We were discussing my work and what I could do to improve it… this was before I had done my first MAD job and when I was furiously trying to “break in” to the magazine (which is not to be confused with my attempts to break in to the MAD offices… those efforts are a part of public police records). He pointed out to me that there was a noticeable difference between my caricatures of celebrities i.e. people who were supposed to “be somebody” in my illustrations and those who were just background or secondary characters. It was very apparent in my drawings who were representations of real people, and who were made up out of my head. His point was that this difference was noticeable to the point of distraction, and although I didn’t need to necessarily do full blown caricatures of real people for every face in a panel, I should make them look like they COULD be a real person… that they have enough presence and individuality to be a believable person, even if they are not the focus. I started using books of modeling agency head shots and stock photography books to get ideas for my background character’s features, hairstyles, look, etc. and also adding in people I know just for fun.

I combined that bit of advice with another that I consider the second most important thing anyone ever taught me about cartooning and illustration… this one came from long time MAD editor Nick Meglin, again prior to my doing work for MAD. I was having lunch with both he and Sam at the Society of Illustrators in New York, my having come to NYC to show them some of my latest work. Nick explained to me the importance of having a coherent look to the way you draw anything. His example was an artist who’s work can always be counted on to be an example of how to do it right… the great Jack Davis.

“Everybody knows Jack draws people and hands and feet and things like that very distinctively, and you can instantly recognize a Jack Davis hand or a Jack Davis foot… but you can also instantly recognize a Jack Davis chair, or boat, or cow, or baseball glove, or parking meter, or…”

Nick went on for about 15 minutes, kind of like Bubba in Forrest Gump about the different ways to cook shrimp. I think Sam eventually kicked him in the shin under the table and then he stopped.

Anyway, his point was that an illustrator draws the world as he/she sees it through their eyes, and it’s as important that your drawings of chairs or boats or parking meters look like they belong in the same world as the more important stuff you are drawing. So many caricature artists out there don’t understand this, having what I call “Live Caricature Disease”, or LCD. LCD is a condition in which the live caricaturist, through years of conditioning, believes the entire universe starts at the top of a person’s head and ends at their neck. The rest of the world needs to be described just as much as those faces do… and placing those faces in a world in which they look like they belong makes the caricatures all that more strong.

So, I do think it’s important that the details are paid attention to. Your example of drawing a car is a good one. No, I wouldn’t necessarily need to make sure the make and model of every car I draw be recognizable, but it should look like a convincing car. If I don’t know enough about the way a car (or any object I need to draw) looks I will get a picture and get a feel for it. I won’t necessarily draw the exact car in my reference photo, but I will use that picture to draw something that is not only unmistakably a car but one that contains convincing details like hood seams and air intake grills and such that it looks substantial and not like a cardboard cutout of a car put in for a prop. You don’t want to over-detail your secondary elements in an illustration to the point they distract from the focus of the image, but it can be equally distracting to have some odd looking thing that is SUPPOSED to be a car but which is so badly misproportioned or has some other flaws as to look out of place. Buildings are another good example. When I draw a building I want it to look not only like a real building but one that is appropriate for the environment I am drawing. It would not make sense to draw the facade of some New York brownstone if the scene of my illustration was in the French Quarter in New Orleans. There details are crucial, even though buildings are seldom part of the focus but usually background elements. Again, too much detail can be distracting but an overall convincing look enhances that believable world you are trying to describe with your drawings. I wouldn’t want to draw every brick in the facade or other minute details, but I’d want to get the essential elements like the molding, window casings, placement or elements and overall look accurate and enough details drawn or suggested to give it a convincing and substantial look.

Thanks to Jamie Littin 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!

Today is “opening day” for the movie “I Want Your Money“, a conservative film by filmmaker Ray Griggs for which I did a bunch of artwork including the caricature of Obama for the above movie poster, character designs for the animated sequences as well as storyboard for those segments.

This movie is getting quite a bit of press. The Lovely Anna called me this morning (I’m in Ohio for the OSU Festival of Cartoon Art”) to say there was a feature about the film on the Today Show this morning that was mostly clips of the animation using my character designs. I’ve also gotten a number of calls and e-mails from friends telling me they saw the trailer or the poster at a theater. Politically this is a pretty charged film, although I have not actually seen it to say just how charged, so predictably it’s being praised by the right and maligned by the left, but it’s getting attention either way. I might not agree with Ray’s political ideals but he is a very nice and hard working guy, so I hope the film does very well for him. You can find where it might be playing near you here.

The animation segments are being roasted on CartoonBrew, the animation blog… and rightly so considering the audience there. The short animated segments were never meant to be “feature quality” and shouldn’t even be in the conversation at a place like CartoonBrew. The animation is rough and low budget, and the “big head-little body” character designs aren’t very well suited for animation but that’s the look that Ray wanted. I was hired to do turn around caricature designs specifically in a big head-little body/bobblehead proportion of a number of politicians, and to storyboard out the sequences. That was where my involvement in the animation process stopped. I’ve got no experience at all in animation, which I explained to Ray, but he wanted me to do the work so I delivered exactly what he and the animators asked me for.

In Ray’s defense, the original animation team dropped the ball having never delivered anything past some rough 3D designs until way past several deadlines leaving him in the lurch. Eventually a company called SO Animation did the work with very little time and a very small budget, with the results you see… awkward movement, no shadows from the characters cast in the environment, terrible mouth syncing, weirdly glowing inner mouths. Under the circumstances the animated segments turned out as good as they could have… it is what it is.

Anyway best of luck to Ray and congratulations on the attention his film is getting. I wish him great success with it.

I’m currently in Columbus, OH for the Festival of Cartoon Art, a once-every-three-years celebration of the art of cartooning held at Ohio State University and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library. You can read all about the event in this post.

Should be a great time with plenty of terrific panels and speakers. Full report next week…

As promised, here’s a look at a bit of the art for the parody of “Glee” in the just-released MAD #506:

Click for a closer look…

My kids are big Glee fans so they ended up in the splash page (Gabrielle and Tom in upper left on stair landing, college girl Victoria to right of “Sue Sylvester” with her boyfriend Pat). Oldest girl Elizabeth doesn’t like Glee but if I ever do a “Roseanne” parody she’s in. I had a lot of fun with this one.

I’ve got a section of my website entitled the Me Gallery chock full of caricatures of me from artists all over the world. If you are interested n the funny(ish) story of how the Me Gallery began, you can read about that here. Many are from the many International Society of Caricature Artists conventions I’ve been to, but many more are unsolicited submissions from artists who just send them in to be included. I just updated it last week with dozens of recent entries, and currently there are 255 different caricatures of yours truly… if you haven’t seen this you should check it out. Given these are all of the same person it’s an amazing example of the diversity of the art of caricature.

There is another caricaturist out there who has a gallery of caricatures of himself that gives mine a run for it’s money… his name is Marcelo Guerra. He has a Facebook photo gallery with a lot of them on it. The sketch above is one I did of him for his gallery, here is the reference picture (one of them, anyway) and the finished artwork:

He requested I do it in a pen and ink, black and white wash technique. In the interests of full disclosure he did commission me for this.

EDIT- Aggh! After visiting his Facebook gallery I see he has a Bruce Stark original of him which is way cool but look at the pose Bruce did of him!:

Honest, I had NOT seen that before I did my drawing above. Well… being of like mind to someone as amazingly talented as Bruce is not a bad thing.

Incidentally, Marcelo is one of only two other people I know who managed to get a personal caricature done by the great Mort Drucker. Mort famously declines to do personal commissions, and how he got him to do this one must be a story in itself:

Last night’s episode of MAD on the Cartoon Network had one of the segments I worked on… this one was called “Batman Family Feud”. Here is some of the art I did for the animators to work with:

I’m not sure why they decided to go with a combination of the 1989 movie Michael Keaton Batman, the “Batman Begins”/”Dark Knight Returns” Michael Caine Alfred and the 60′s TV show Robin and Batgirl. The Riddler they wanted to be generic, and neither Frank Gorshin nor Jim Carrey. I think these drawings represent the style of finishes that work best with the animation needs, are are the way I’ve been doing them since experimenting with various inking and pencilling techniques over the first few episodes. I did these using a brush-like marker pen and then simple PhotoShop color.

In mailboxes and comic shops this week and on news stands October 19th:

MAD # 506 (December 2010)

• Cover (Mark Fredrickson)
• The Fundalini Pages (Jeff Kruse, Mort Drucker, Joe Masterman, Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dyer, Jacob Lambert, Bob Staake, Eric Scott, Rick Tulka, Scott Nickel, Matthew A. Cohen, Angelo Torres, Brian & Sean Farrelly, Anton Emdin, Dick DeBartolo, J.C. Duffy, Jack Syracuse, Dave Croatto, Ward Sutton, Corey Pandolph)
• Glee-tarded (Arnie Kogen, Tom Richmond)
• A MAD Look At The Oil Spill (Sergio Aragonés, Tom Luth)
• RosettaStone- Mel Gibson Domestic Abuse Edition (A MAD Ad Parody)
• A Beginner’s Guide to a More Prosperous Career in Panhandling (John Caldwell)
• Some Serious Monkey Business (Brian McConnachie, Leonadro Rodriguez)
• Tea Party Logic (Barry Liebmann, Paul Coker)
• Signs You’ve Got a Bad Roommate (Teresa Burns Parkhurst)
• The MAD World of… Fashion (Stan Sinberg, Marc Hempel)
• Deleted Passages From George W. Bush’s New Book (Charlie Kadau, Sam Viviano)
• MAD’s Less-Than-Magical Outtakes from Harry Potter (Uncredited)
• Spy vs Spy (Peter Kuper)
• The 2010 Lack-of-Entertainment Book (Scott Maiko)
• The Strip Club (John Kovaleski, Keith Knight, Peet Tamburino, Jacob Lambert, Jason Yungbluth, Christopher Baldwin, Douglas Paszkiewicz)
• MAD’s Handy Quick Primer to World of Warcraft (Desmond Devlin, Hermann Mejia)
• The MAD Vault -1978 (Various)
• Dead Lobster (Andy Ross, Irving Schild)
• MAD Fold-In (Al Jaffee)
• Drawn Out Dramas (Sergio Aragonés)

This issue has a lot of appearances by some seldom seen and much missed artists such as Mort Drucker, Angelo Torres, Sam Viviano and Paul Coker. It also has a few more art driven features than a typical issue included plus BOTH Teresa Burns Parkhurst and John Caldwell in the same issue (usually it’s one or the other), a Stan Sinberg/Marc Hempel “The MAD World of…”, the Desmond Devlin/Hermann Mejia and Barry Liebmann/Paul Coker pieces and a Sam Viviano illustrated piece… a little old school MAD for you! Also this issue features the first of what will probably be many appearances by Australian cartoonist/illustrator Anton Emdin, who does work for the Aussie MAD including his parody of “Glee” in that publication which he hopefully will share on his blog when it is published.

My contribution this issue is a five page parody of the TV show “Glee” written by Arnie Kogen, look for a sneak peek at that on Thursday because tomorrow I’ll be sharing some of the work I did on tonight’s “Batman Family Feud” segment on the MAD show.