Q:  I have been looking to your drawings for inspiration, and I have realized that they look very clean and flawless. So my question is do you find yourself making a lot of mistakes when drawing or even sketching? How often do you erase, if at all? What is your tool of choice for erasing? (because I can seriously never tell so it must be damn good).

A: Of course I make a lot of mistakes when I sketch, and I do plenty of erasing. The sketches I post for the “Sketch o’the Week” are usually ones I have “tightened up” a bit, meaning I erase some of the stray lines and use some bolder, stronger lines to make it more defined and less “sketchy”. Also, when I scan them in I play with the values in PhotoShop to strength the lines. That doesn’t mean I don’t have many stray lines or don’t do any erasing. That’s what a sketch is all about… exploring and experimenting.

Here are a couple of raw sketches and studies I did recently for my “Secret Agent Man” print:

As you can see, plenty sketchy and loose. These studies were redrawn as more involved sketches, then transferred to bristol board for final artwork.

As for erasers, I like to use kneadable erasers and occasionally white, plastic ones. I hate pink pearls and gum erasers.

Thanks to Rachel Rivera 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!

Click for a closer look…

Each Friday for the next several weeks I will post the opening pages to a chapter of my book, The Mad Art of Caricature!, along with a description of the chapter’s contents. Since I’ve already done this for chapters one , two, and nine, that leaves five more chapters after this week, which should be about right for the arrival of the printed books on my doorstep.

Chapter Three is about head shapes, which I consider to be the most important aspect of doing caricature. In it I discuss why they are so important, techniques to “see” them and to simplify them so they are easier to draw and exaggerate, the important parts of the anatomy of the skull and musculature that pertain to caricaturing and several concepts for exaggerating the head shape. As with the rest of the book, the chapter is illustrated with dozens of black and white and full color illustrations. The chapter consists of 14 pages and contains over 25 illustrations.

You can pre-order The Mad Art of Caricature! here. Shipping to commence immediately after printed books arrive in late September.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Spy vs. Spy, and MAD has been busy with the celebrations. One of the cooler things they did was to produce a bunch of prototype, unpainted Spy figures and send them out to a variety of artists and sculptors, inviting them to make their own custom Spy. They had a glass case full of the resulting figures at Comic-Con last month, and have been busy posting images of a new one every day on their shiny new blog, The Idiotical. The one above was done by my friend, fellow NCS member and the creator of Foxtrot, Bill Amend.

There are lots of others, ranging from the whimsical to the downright bizarre. Go check them out. In fact, if you don’t regularly visit The Idiotical, you are missing out. It’s chock full of chuckles posted on a daily basis.

I did this sketch of Malcolm in the Middle actor Erik Per Sullivan for one of the chapters in my book, The Mad Art of Caricature!. The chapter in question is focused on drawing and caricaturing individual features. Can you guess which feature this one was an example of?

Congratulations to Minnesota Twins slugger Jim Thome for bashing home run number 600 last night! He’s one of only eight ballplayers to accomplish this feat in Major League Baseball. At 40 he’s the oldest player to do it but reached the milestone in one of the fewest at-bat totals.

Thome spent most of his career playing against the Twins when with Cleveland and Chicago, but tried as I might I just couldn’t hate the guy. He’s one of the true gentlemen of the game and a throwback to the old ballplayer who played for the love of the game and not money. He’s been one of the only bright spots in a bad season for the hometown nine.

Congratulations, Jim Thome!

Q: I noticed, when trying to re-learn cartooning, that daily and Sunday strips seem to not always have backgrounds. But comic books and MAD mags usually always have some kind of back ground in each frame. Sometimes I find doing backgrounds tedious or even distracting, but I feel I am cheating myself by avoiding them.  I also noticed a similar effect with daily/Sunday’s showing most or all of the shots from the same perspective. Whereas, comic books/MAD see to redraw each from a different angle. Are there reasons why daily/Sunday strips skimp or cheat as opposed to comic books and MAD?

A: What you are really talking about here is the difference between cartooning/illustration done for different purposes and mediums, and not just backgrounds specifically. The approach to graphic storytelling changes depending on factors like the intended print/reader presentation, the kind of story being told, the style of the artist and what is or is not necessary visually to tell the story. However backgrounds are a good example of one of the differences between types of storytelling, so we’ll stick to that specifically.

One of the reasons most comic strips today contain minimal backgrounds is for purely technically reasons. Today’s strips print so small in newspapers that detailed backgrounds or art are lost and become muddy and unreadable. There was a time when strips printed very large and cartoonists doing dailies drew them 15″ wide or larger. With all that room and legibility they had the option of doing more detailed or elaborate backgrounds and art because it could be seen and enjoyed by the viewer. Today’s strips print so small, any detailed backgrounds would become mush, and even detailed character work would get lost… especially on newsprint. Due to those limitations, comic strip artists have been forced to simplify their artwork to tell their stories and gags effectively. Some specific styles are simple anyway, and work well for that reason. Most strips are telling short stories/gags meant for quick reading and consumption, so detailed backgrounds seldom serve much of a functional purpose. As far as changing perspective, some strips do or did do that a lot—Rose is Rose still does and Calvin and Hobbes did it frequently. There are many other examples. That is more of a choice with the artist, their style and the story they are trying to impart visually. Some cartoonists keep it simple and stick with the single frame angle with just the characters changing as they interact. A cartoonist could certainly incorporate “camera-angle” changes into a strip and make it work, even with the shrunken sizes of today’s strips. Likewise some backgrounds can and are drawn into dailies, but they need to be able to hold up to the small print size and the newsprint printing. Comic strips done for viewing on the web or via an electronic device have none of these limitations.

Comic books and features in MAD have physically larger print sizes and better paper, so the technical limitations of the newspaper comic strip are not an issue with them. Utilizing detailed backgrounds becomes a function of the storytelling here, and are used when environments and such are key parts of what the artist is trying to describe. Usually cartoons drawn for this format involve longer narratives and therefore demand more detailed descriptions of the scene(s). That said, detailed backgrounds are not always appropriate or desirable. To saturate every panel of one of my MAD parodies with elaborate backgrounds would not only be overkill, but actually would detract from the storytelling. The eye has no chance to rest as it moves along the story, and is bombarded to the point of over-saturation. The pages as a whole become too busy and dense. I will spend some time on detailed backgrounds in a few panels on a given page, where the scene needs establishing or the action needs to be described in a context, but I also will do limited detail or leave out backgrounds entirely in some panels to keep the story flowing. I’m not being lazy, I’m doing that with the effectiveness of the whole in mind.

So, do not feel you are “cheating yourself” by not doing super-elaborate backgrounds in your strip or cartoons. Ask yourself if they are needed for a reason, if the artwork is more effective with them, and if the final output of the work will support detailed background work. Spend time on them if they will make your work better… that is not always the case.

Thanks to Jim Jackle 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!

Click for a closer look…

Here’s another sneak peek at the inside of my upcoming book The MAD Art of Caricature!, which is shipping next month. Chapter 2- Basic Caricature Theory explains several of the basic theories behind caricature, exaggeration, likeness—how to see it and how to draw it. This chapter consists of 14 pages and contains over 35 illustrations.

I’ve gotten a number of inquiries asking if the book is just a paper version of my on-line tutorials. The answer is NO. The information in the tutorials is incorporated into the book, but they are expanded upon and many more concepts and techniques are introduced and discussed. People familiar with the tutorials will recognize some of the text and some of the images, but at over 170 pages of content, there is many times more information in the book, with pages and pages of new text and hundreds of new illustrations. Plus it will have that freshly printed new book smell!

You can pre-order The Mad Art of Caricature! today. All copies ordered directly from me are signed, but you can also choose options for either a sketch of Alfred E. Newman or a random piece of original art from the book (like the sketch of Brad Pitt on page 14 above… that option is limited and running out fast).

MAD posted the cover art for upcoming issue number 511 on their official Blog, The Idiotical, yesterday. I guess it’s now safe to say that I did the artwork for the parody of Parks and Recreation, although I will hold off on posting any images until the issue actually comes out. I will say that I had a lot of fun doing that one… no boring faces, that’s for sure!

The issue is scheduled for news stands on Aug 23rd, so they will likely be showing up in mailboxes and comic book shops next week.

I have to skip the Sketch o’the Week this week. Swamped. Overwhelmed. Talking. Like. Frank. Miller. Character.