The Great MAD Art Sale is over. Thanks to everyone who purchased some of my originals from my first ten years of working for MAD. Look for the next Great MAD Art Sale in 2020, where I will have a selection of my second decade of original MAD artwork available for cheap, cheap, cheap!

In the meantime you can always visit the Studio Store for some original artwork from MAD and other stuff… at slightly more inflated prices.

Q: Thanks for your blog and especially the tutorials. I refer to your blog weekly for inspiration and tips. While you mention your preferences for inking and drawing surfaces, I was wondering what types of pencil leads, holders, and paper you use for the “sketch of the week”?

A: Thanks for the kind words about the blog. I’m very glad you enjoy it.

As for the materials I use for the “Sketch o’the Week”- while I do occasionally experiment with things like inks, washes, etc., 95% of the sketches I post for SOTW are done in a basic Strathmore (or similar) sketchbook with a number 2 lead pencil… you know, the kind with the eraser on the end. I use all sorts of different kinds but my favorites are the unpainted, smooth type from OfficeMax. They are cheap and the leads have a nice feel to them. Plus, the have a white rubber eraser on the end as opposed to the “pink pearl” type which often gets hard and streaks pink color on the paper. Of course, they need sharpening all the time but I have an electric sharpener close at hand and feed it regularly. I also like the Mirado Black Warrior 2 HB pencils (Office Depot), also cheap but I hate the erasers on those.

For example, right now I am drawing in a Strathmore 400 series premium recycled 11″ x 14″ pad with 60lb weight paper and I am mostly drawing with the OfficeMax specials. Not sexy, I know, but they work.

Actually I really need to break out of that routine and use some different materials for SOTW. I’ll try to do that in the new year. Thanks for the inspiration!

Thanks to Eileen McCoy 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 promise this will be the last reminder that The Great MAD Art Sale will be over in a little more than 48 hours.

It’s been pretty successful although there are still plenty of pieces left, including some cheap $75 full parody pages from movie “Behind Enemy Lines” (Gene Hackman, Owen Wilson) and TV shows  “The Bernie Mac Show”, “America’s Most Wanted” and “Boston Public”, $100 pages from “Traffic” (Michael Doudlas, Benecio del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jone, etc), “The Royal Tennenbaums” (Gene Hackman again, Luke Wilson) and TV shows “Dog the Bounty Hunter” and “Scrubs” plus a few $150 pages from HBO’s “Entourage” and the movie “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”. There are also a few of the $25, $40 and $50 spot illustrations left.

I’m a little surprised any pages are left from the Harry Potter film, but there are still three left. That, BTW, was the longest movie parody in MAD in 25 years at 9 pages. The only one I could find that was longer was the parody of “Superman II” at a whopping 10 pages.

A lot of nice folks have bought a lot of pages and pieces of original art. Thanks to everybody who did. I am shipping out the last two pages that have been purchased today, so if you haven;t already received your packages they are on the way. The full parody pages are very big, measuring about 18 x 22 inches in their foamcore packing, so the shipping might take a little longer. I hope everyone who got a piece of MAD art is happy with their original.

The Great MAD Art Sale ends on this Monday, Dec. 20th . At some point during the day I’ll take the page down and move some of the pieces over to the Studio Store, where you can always go and buy some MAD art and the occasional other piece of crap. The prices won;t be quite this low, though. The purpose of this was to clear out another drawer in the constantly overflowing flatfile cabinet and to raise a little moola for a vacation The Lovely Anna and I will be taking after the New Year. Both goals are some way down the road to being accomplished, so thanks again!

However, as Han Solo once said “It’s not over yet!”…Just click on the image above to see the many pieces of original MAD artwork still available! Questions? E-mail me!

I received a note from an interested party yesterday concerning The Great MAD Art Sale (which officially ends on Monday, BTW… don’t delay, order now!) asking about original MAD cover artwork. He was looking to buy an original MAD cover, and wanted to know if I had any or if Mark Fredrickson has any originals available for sale?

My answers were: No, unfortunately I’ve never done a cover for MAD (well, two for MAD Kids and one for a MAD advertising insert… but they hardly count) and have no originals of cover art and, regarding Mark’s covers, I don’t believe any originals exist because he works 100% digitally these days. Fairness in conversation: I did the covers I just mentioned digitally as well.

Back in 2008 the last (an best) of the original cover art owned by MAD (or, more accurately the parent company of MAD: Time Warner) was sold at auction. Among them were 13 original covers done by the likes of Norman Mingo and Kelly Freas (and one chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs), that were considered the “Soul of MAD” i.e covers that represented what MAD was all about. They sold for a combined $750,000.

Legendary movie poster artist Drew Struzan recently retired from doing movie posters. He worked in acrylic and mixed media doing original paintings for some of the most icon movies posters in film history. His originals routinely sell for $90,000-$150,000.

Despite that market, the days of seeing that kind of original art available for sale is rapidly coming to a close. The reason? Computers. Digital artwork is taking over the commercial art field and more and more work is being done on the computer leaving no originals to be bought, framed and admired on a wall somewhere.

Take MAD covers, for example. Mark took over as the principal MAD cover artist arguably in 2003, when 5 of the last 6 issues of the year had covers illustrated by him. Except for a handful of special covers that were cartoon characters, graphics, dual covers or by the VERY rare different artist, Mark has done every MAD cover since 2005. Mark long ago put away his airbrush and went 100% digital,so as far as I know there are no originals of any of his MAD covers. Maybe he has pencil sketches or a tight pencil drawing or something that is “original” in the sense that it was part of the process of creating the cover, but there is no piece of physical artwork that corresponds with the finished cover image with Mark.

That seems pretty sad. However it’s really a kind of return to the old days and old ways. Back in the early-mid 1900′s when magazines and periodicals ruled the world of entertainment content and advertising, commercial artwork was hardly considered “art”. Magazine covers and art for publications and ads were done with materials that gave no thought to archival quality or anything other than looking good long enough to get reproduced and then it was trash. Nobody thought of this stuff as having any secondary value. MAD publisher Bill Gaines saved every piece of art ever done for MAD as he owned it all (based on the work for hire agreement all MAD artists and writers worked under), but I doubt he had any idea that the cover art of MAD #30 would one day sell for $250,000. Commercial art was a means to an end, and once the end was achieved then that art was done being of value.

It wasn’t until the nostalgia factor took over that original commercial artwork became valuable in a secondary market. Highly visible stuff like magazine cover art, art for iconic ads and products and other commercial illustration started being collected by a new generation of adults that were weaned on things like comic books and publications and who connected with those images on a personal level and… and here’s the important thing… grew up to have both money and the attitude that they would rather hang the original artwork of a cover of Spider-Man on their wall than some modern art minimalist painting. Suddenly all that trash art from yesteryear became treasures to the pop-culture saavy new professionals of the day looking to decorate their dens. A lot of that artwork was destroyed or done with materials that plain old faded away (Dr. Martin Dyes, a popular medium of color for commercial art in the 60′s, were especially infamous for losing their color and intensity is short order) so there was also a scarcity in available originals. Even the market for original comic book art, which often was saved if only for reasons of possible future reproduction, didn’t become a real market until the kids of the 50′s and 60′s became the adults of the late 70′s and 80′s with money to spend.

The point is that the illustrators of decades ago didn’t give much of a thought about the art they did past it’s reproduction. Today’s digital artist has the same sort of mentality… an original is far less important that producing the work in a faster and more efficient manner that makes for the transition from concept to printed piece as quick and seamless as possible. So you see, it’s all a return to the past.

The sad part of that equation is all the walls bereft of original illustration art in the future.

This video has really been making the rounds on the Interwebby. Before anyone cries foul over the ‘dark’ nature of the clip, go rent and watch “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”. Not only is it an underrated movie, but the climatic assassination/death scene in it is what this clip parodies. Michael Cavna of the excellent Comics Riffs blog on Washingtonpost.com interviews animator and creator of the short Edmund Earle.

It’s been a long time since I did a caricature of actor and nutcase Tom Cruise. Just watched the movie “Knight and Day”, which was watchable but a long way from good. I still can’t figure out where the “Day” in the title comes from… Cruise’s characters real surname is “Knight”, but I can’t think of any connection to a “Day”. Cameron Diaz‘s character’s name is June Havens. Ah well, the title makes about as much sense as the plot.

Penthouse Magazine assigned me a series of illustrations to use as a “header” (pun not intended) for a new monthly feature column by musician/celebrity Dave Navarro. These spot illustrations will accompany Dave’s articles in each issue. The one above is in the latest issue, and I have two more “in the can” as they say in the biz for future issues.

Just another friendly reminder that The Great MAD Art Sale ends one week from today, on Dec. 20th. Some of the artwork will be available after in the “Studio Store” but gone will be the insanely expensive cheap prices and they will be even more ridiculously overpriced than they are now. There are still a number of full parody pages from movies like “Traffic” (my first movie parody in MAD), “Behind Enemy Lines”, “The Royal Tennenbaums” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” , as well as TV shows like “Scrubs”, “Entourage”, “Dog the Bounty Hunter”, “The Bernie Mac Show”, “America’s Most Wanted” and “Boston Public” for as little as $75 a page. These are gigantic 16.5″ x 21″ originals, by the way. Suitable for framing, dartboards or shoe wiping after coming in from the garage. In fact, $75 is cheaper than some floor mats I’ve seen.

There are also a number of super cheap $25 pieces, a few at $40 and $50… and all these pieces have been published in MAD (I know, big deal…)

Of course they all come signed as well. You get to choose the manner of the signature. I can sign just my name, personalize it to you or whomever you specify, or I can sign someone else’s name like “Chuck Norris” or possibly “Lady Gaga”… although I might charge you extra for that one.

Just click on the image above to see the many pieces of original MAD artwork still available! Questions? E-mail me!

BTW- Thanks to everybody who has purchased a piece of art from me… all packages have been shipped. Thanks again!

Q: How do you choose the colors for your illustrations and parodies?  Do you use the colors you see in the DVD’s and photo boards, or do you just make them up?  I know the basics of color selection such as the color wheel etc, but do you have any special techniques?

A: Occasionally I am asked the same or similar questions for the mailbag, and every once and awhile I will repost the answer to a commonly asked question for the benefit of those who are newer readers, although I often add things to them or expand on the original answer. This is such a case:

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 the focus on the illustration and depth/perspective. The more saturated/intense the color, the more it draws the eye and “comes forward” in the image, and the less saturated the less noticeable it is and the father back it seems. Likewise with warm versus cool colors. Warm colors advance while cool colors recede. Here’s an example from 2008′s  “Who’s thinking What at the Obama Inauguration” for MAD. 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:

values are also as important as color. More so, in fact. The value (level of lightness/darkness) of a color changes it’s impact within the image. Objects painted with less contrast between it’s elements will be more washed out and recede while those with intense values and contrast will pop out. I use the old “squint” test when assessing values of my colors (squint your eyes and look through your eyelashes at the image, this helps see vague shapes and values as opposed to detail).

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 Ken Best 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!

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 DEC 15th, 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 2009′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 December 15th… which is two months earlier than it has been in the past!!! …so don’t procrastinate! Get that application and send it your artwork ASAP.