The National Cartoonists Society Foundation, the charitable arm of the NCS, announced the winner of the 2011 Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship yesterday:

2011 Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship Winner

March 28th, 2011

The National Cartoonists Society Foundation (NCSF) is happy to announce the winner of the 2011 Jay Kennedy Memorial Scholarship.

Diana Huh, is a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she studies history. Huh was chosen from over 100 applicants for the award, which includes a $5,000 scholarship and a trip to the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award weekend in Boston in May. The scholarship applicants submitted eight examples of their work along with an entry form that included short essays on their current and future plans in cartooning. Entries were judged by a jury of seven professional cartoonists who are members of the National Cartoonists Society Foundation.

Huh is an illustrator for UCLA’s newspaper The Daily Bruin and is presently interning at Greenhouse Studios assisting on coloring the comic “Mace and Sputnik.” She has also created an on-going web comic called “The Wayside Manor.”

You can check out her artwork on DeviantART. Diana is a tremendous talent. Congratulations!

This week’s sketch is a bit of a cop out… as it was part of a preliminary drawing for a cover illustration job I did recently. The subject is reality TV… uh…. “star” Kim Kardashian. The image changed quite a bit after the client’s art direction. I will be able to share that final art sometime next month.

A few months back the website The Cartoonist Studio put together a media press release about their official launch, and tapped a few of the cartoonists on the site to do a drawing for one of the recipients. I did this little spot illustration for the packet that went to The TODAY Show.

If you haven’t visited The Cartoonist Studio, you should. It’s a virtual tour of the studios and work of (currently) 23 professional cartoonists including those working in editorial cartooning, comic strips, illustration, gag cartooning, greeting cards, etc. It’s fun to see the faces and places behind some work you are sure to be familiar with.

Q: I’ve read on your blog that you have several caricature booth stands in a few different amusement parks around the country. How did you get into that and how can someone apply for a job drawing caricatures?

A: My first real “art” job, outside of a few commissions for friends and others, was drawing caricatures at Six Flags Great America theme park in Gurnee, IL just north of Chicago. I got the job by answering a flyer ad with the headline “Can You Draw?” that was hanging in the studio arts building at the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis while I was attending college there. It turned out to be from a company called Fasen Arts, which did caricatures and airbrush T-Shirts at various theme parks. That was the summer of 1985, and I worked with Fasen Arts for four years at Great America while I put myself through college. After I graduated in 1989 The Lovely Anna and I, newly married, moved down to Atlanta to manage a new location for them at Six Flags Atlanta. While there I opened my own operation at the grand opening of a newly remodeled shopping/entertainment property called Underground Atlanta. I closed that booth in 2008 after 19 years in operation. In the meantime we moved back to Minnesota and I opened up a location at Valleyfair, the local theme park, in 1991. I have since expanded into other venues like Six Flags St. Louis and Six Flags New England near Springfield, MA as well as Nickelodeon Universe here in Minnesota. We also do airbrush t-shirts and airbrush tattoos in some of the locations.

Getting a job doing caricatures is simple. You just have to demonstrate to me that you have the drawing skills and natural eye to do good caricature art, and show me you can be the type of person who I can rely on to do their job and the little things like show up on time, work hard and be dedicated to improving your craft. Most artists that come to work with us don’t have a lot of experience doing live caricatures, but they have the necessary talent and learn our techniques along the way. I always have a few positions open every season, so interested artists can e-mail me about any of the above locations.

Thanks to Grant Jonen 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

The Lovely Anna and I are headed to Southern California on a business/fun trip. Sadly it’s cold and rainy there, but at least there’s no snow.

The brouhaha from Nov. 2008 concerning Apple’s rejection of the iPhone app “Bobble Rep” due to the heinous nature of my caricatures has long died down, but the app needed updating now that the 112th congress has convened. Thus, I had to do small disembodied caricatures of the new members of congress for the app’s bobblehead images… all 108 of them!

Here are a few of my favorites:

Steve Chabot- OH                              Daniel Coats- IN

Sean Duffy- WI                              Alan Nunnelee- MS

James Renacci- OH                              Frederica Wilson- FL

The new and improved Bobble Rep app will be available in the iTunes App Store soon… I’ll let you know when you can go there and spend $.99 of your hard earned dough on it.

Ordinarily I mock and ridicule people who mock and ridicule things like movies, TV shows or books they haven’t at least tried or given a fair chance. That said, I have to admit I have never seen any of the “Twilight” movies nor read the books but am guilty of unilaterally disdaining them mainly because they are so inescapable in all aspects of pop culture that I’m just sick of hearing about them… kind of like the Kardashians and “Jersey Shore”. Then again, you could say the same thing about Harry Potter, and in that case I loved both the books and the movies. Frankly, I think in this instance I’m safe in my assumptions I’d hate “Twilight”.

Anyway, when the big “Twilight” craze started and I had to stare at the smug faces of the stars of the series on the cover of every magazine and entertainment news website, I promised myself I would live my entire life without ever drawing Robert Pattinson. This was a promise I knew I would only have a small chance of keeping, as eventually I would be asked to draw him for some client project and that would be that. I thought there was an outside chance I’d not get a “Twilight” job before the film series was done, and then there would be an excellent chance we’d never hear about Robert Pattinson again and I’d be in the clear.

No such luck.

I just got an assignment for a client who shall remain nameless for the moment requiring me to draw the main three characters of the Twilight movies, so I figured I might as well get it over with and draw Robert Pattinson for the Sketch o’the Week. Here he is.

Just for the record, no doubt Robert Pattinson is a splendid guy, with a winning personality and a genuine, fun-loving heart to go with his ridiculously haunting good looks. Overexposure is a bitch.

On the plus side, I have still not broken my promise of having never seen a single minute of “It’s a Wonderful Life”, and barring someone stapling my eyelids to my forehead and tying me in front of a TV I never will…. that one can go on my tombstone.

I’d go to this:

R. Crumb Retrospective – NYC 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011 – 7:00pm-10:00pm
Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St., NYC

The Society of Illustrators proudly presents “R. Crumb: Lines Drawn on Paper,”
an exhibition of original artwork spanning the past four decades.

This 90-piece exhibit showcases seminal covers and interior pages from ZAP, HEAD COMIX, THE EAST VILLAGE OTHER, MOTOR CITY COMICS, BIG ASS, HOMEGROWN FUNNIES, SAN FRANCISCO COMICS, and much, much more.

This retrospective, curated by BLAB! magazine founder Monte Beauchamp, editor of The Life & Times of R. Crumb (St. Martin’s Press), presents key pieces culled from the private art collection of Eric Sack, with contributions from John Lautemann, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner.

Both R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky-Crumb will be attending the show.

PLEASE NOTE: Saturday Night’s performance by R. Crumb & the East River String Band (and friends) is SOLD OUT.

But… I’m not. So I won’t. But I would If I was.

FEED ME! FEEEEEEEEED ME! FEED ME, SEYMOUR!

Q: Have you ever worked on a MAD splash page (or any page for that matter) and have an accident happen to it that made it impossible to repair (for example, spilled ink all over the drawing)?  And along with that, have you ever completed a page, and when you were finished (inking, coloring, etc.) noticed that you left out a critical detail, or messed up on a very necessary feature that needed changed and would be close to impossible to just “add in”?  If anything like this were to happen, would MAD have to send out a new board to draw on or how would this be fixed?

A: I cannot remember ever having something happen that completely ruined a piece necessitating a complete starting over. That would have to be a really major catastrophe… like spilling the ink as you suggested. Even a pretty good sized spill or some other defacement could be fixed with a lot of “White Out” or, barring that, cutting a section of the board and pasting in another section of board like a puzzle piece, then working on top of it. I have done both a few times in the past in extreme circumstances.

Of course, those were the “good old days”. Now the computer has made White Out and laborious physical corrections obsolete. I don’t use White Out at all anymore, except for one specific need I’ll mention in a second. I do all corrections and “fixing” after scanning the line art. That includes all smudges, smears, splatters and any other of the fun little things that happen when you wave and scrape a pointed metal-ended stick or one with a tangle of tiny, bundled together hairs on the end dripping with permanently-staining dense black liquid over a perfectly white surface. It also includes real “corrections” like drawing a face or fixing some elements that became indistinct or otherwise unreadable during the inking stage. Yes… as much as I say I dislike drawing on the computer I will redraw important elements like faces and even large parts of panels or what-have-you in order to fix something. I never said I couldn’t do it, I just don’t like it as much as drawing on real paper.

PhotoShop’s ability to use layers, completely remove any elements with no trace, select and move elements about and about a million other useful features makes it relatively quick and effective to do even major corrections and have the end (i.e. printed) results be seamless. It’s an illustrator’s best friend.

So, what is that single use for White Out I still have? I use it to correct things on original artwork, but only to make it match the computer-corrected print versions in the event someone wants to buy said original. It takes much longer to do it by hand, so I save the time when I’m racing against a deadline and take it only when the original is being sold to someone.

Thanks to fellow member of the “Usual Gang of Idiots” Nate Fakes 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!