My most recent workplace poster illustration

Here’s what’s cooking on the board this week:

• Marlin Co. Workplace poster- Not the one above, but a new one.
• Animated MAD show art- new segment character designs
• Seattle Business magazine- Series of spots for a “best of” article
• Jeff Dunham art- More stuff for Jeff, hope to get to post some of this one of these days

Last week I wrapped up the above workplace poster, illustrations for Sports Illustrated Kids, Cleveland Magazine and Penthouse.

Q: Hey Tom! I sometimes find myself drawing fairly complex settings for many of my cartoon layouts and more often than I would like to admit I frequently end up illustrating things -especially oval related objects- using Photoshop tools. Earlier this year you posted an illustration of some folks washing dishes with stacks of plates all around the sink area. Do you use tools like the “Elliptical  Marquee Tool” to help you achieve some of your artwork or is everything done freehand?

A: Here is the illustration he’s talking about:

Click for a closer look…

While I am all for using the computer to make doing things faster and easier, I won’t do anything to interfere with the cohesive feel of the piece. In other words, if doing something on the computer will make it look out of place in the illustration, I won’t do it that way.

In this illustration, I had to draw several stacks of plates and platters of different sizes all about. The figures and the rest of the illustration were hand-drawn and inked, then scanned and the color done in Photoshop. It would have been easier to leave the dishes out of the inked drawing and use the ellipse tool in Photoshop to create them digitally. Then the dishes would have been perfect ellipses, easy to do and gone much faster. The problem with that is they would have been “perfect ellipses”, with uniform and perfect contours. That would have looked very out-of-place with all the lines and forms inked by hand. They would have looked “digital”, something I try to avoid.

I did use a trick in this illustration to simplify the stacks of dishes. Using an ellipse template (the old-fashioned plastic kind for drawing ellipses of different sizes) I drew just the top plate of each stack in pencil (no food or scraps on it, just the plate) and then inked it with the rest of the drawing. Then after I scanned in the drawing and separated the lines onto their own layer, I selected each top plate line drawing and cut/pasted each to their own layer. Then I created a new layer under each plate and colored it, then merged each with the lines above so I had a single full color plate on a separate layer at the top of each stack. After that it was a simple matter to copy the layers multiple times to create the stacks. I was able to make them “lean” and be somewhat uneven. I would maybe turn one of the layers slightly to break up the monotony. Then I added drips and scraps here and there.

The results are convincing as being totally hand-drawn and in keeping with the rest of the illustration because the lines defining each plate ARE hand-drawn. Using the ellipse template for the pencil drawing keeps the shapes accurate but hand-inking it gives it the right look, imperfections and all. In the same spirit, I hand-ink all the straight lines in the cabinets, flooring and tiles for the same reason… a cohesive, hand-drawn look.

Thanks to Nick Nix of Cicero, ID 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!

No, not from the MAD show on Cartoon Network this time. These are some YouTube gems.

These are a collection of animated commercials based on the work of the great Jack Davis:

Here’s the adaptation of Wally Wood’s classic Batboy and Rubin from MAD #8, as seen on the CN’s The Brave and the Bold:

This is the final Friday sneak peek from my book, The Mad Art of Caricature! Here is the table of contents and a few other pages (click them for a closer look):

Final Book Delivery Update: According to the shippers, the books will be arriving here on Tuesday, Oct. 11th. That’s this Tuesday! Shipping will begin immediately. The books will ship in the order in which they were placed, including those that were ordered in person at the San Diego Comic Con. We have almost 500 pre-orders, so it will take a few days to get them all out the door. I expect all pre-orders to have shipped by the end of next week.

Thank you to all who have placed a pre-order and have waited so patiently. The wait is almost over!

Happy sixth birthday to Alan Gardner‘s excellent cartooning industry blog, The Daily Cartoonist!

Alan’s blog is a must-see for me every day, with multiple daily posts featuring news and links concerning the world of professional cartooning, comics and animation. If you aren’t reading The Daily Cartoonist, uh… daily… then you are missing a great resource for cartoonists.

Congrats, TDC!

The interwebs will be bubbling with homages and eulogies for the late Apple frontman Steve Jobs today, most written by people will a lot more passion and insight about the man than I possess, so I won’t go on about it here. However, you can’t lose someone who has had this big of an impact on the world in general without saying something.

The terms “visionary”, “creative genius”, “ahead-of-his-time” and “innovator” will be heard and read much in the coming days when describing Jobs. It would be difficult to name someone who has influenced the path of technology and the way in which millions of people spend their working and leisure time more than Jobs has. Virtually nothing any of us do with respect to computers, mobile phones, listening to music and, increasingly, watching movies and TV was not directly influenced by Jobs. I remember sitting in a computer science class in high school in 1982 writing a simple program on an Apple II computer, one of only a couple our school had, and thinking how amazing this was… right out of “Star Trek”.

Actually I was probably really thinking about getting that assignment done as fast as possible so I could get back to playing Castle Wolfenstein, but….

I also remember in 1986 when the small art college I was studying at got a Macintosh computer. It was in a tiny room at the top of the school (which was an old mansion on Summit Ave. in St. Paul) and students would just wander in there and mess around on “Macpaint”. It was a novelty then, and there were no classes or curriculum built around it. Had future-me appeared and told 1986 me that in only 25 years I would have a device in my pocket about 10,000 times more powerful that that computer, capable of video communicating anyone in the world, watching movies and TV shows on, holding about 6,000 songs, and any of hundreds of thousands of “apps’ that allowed me to do almost anything I could imagine from counting my daily calories to organizing my life to writing a book to playing games, I might have thought I was crazy. Nevermind the Mac, iPod or iPad… telling 1986 me about those might have blown my mind.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent all that stuff or write any of those programs, but his was the idea machine that drove their invention. It’s no exaggeration to say that he was the Ben Franklin. Thomas Edison or Wright Brother of our times. It is fitting that most of the people writing those tributes to him today will be doing it on a computer that he either directly shaped the making of (a Mac) , or greatly influenced the evolution of (Windows).

I know what you are thinking: “So, why is Janet Leigh of Pyscho fame dressed as an elf in this ink sketch?”

That’s a good question . . .

The Southeast chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, in conjunction with the Savannah College of Art and Design, will be hosting a special “MAD” weekend event Nov. 11th-13th in Savannah, GA. Special guests include:

• Sergio Aragonés
• Paul Coker, Jr.
• Jack Davis
• Duck Edwing
• Al Jaffee
• Nick Meglin
• Sam Viviano
• Me!

To say I am thrilled and honored to have my name included in that list would be the understatement of the year.

This is mainly an NCS Southest Chapter meeting, which is only open to NCS members. However at least one event, a discussion panel with all the above guests participating, is open to the public at a nominal cost of $5.00 per person. This will take place on Saturday evening, Nov. 12th at either 4:00-5:30 or 5:00-6:30. There may be more public events as well. I will have more details as they are released.

Original Art Sold Out!

This is just a quick announcement to say that the option to buy a piece of the original artwork used to illustrate my book The Mad Art of Caricature! is officially sold out. You can still order the option for me to do an original sketch of Alfred E. Neuman in the book for an extra $15 (cheap!), and of course all copies are signed for no extra cost. Just a warning, though… once the book starts shipping I will probably raise the price of an Alfred sketch to $20 extra.

This Friday will also be the last “sneak peek” of the book. I was notified by the shipping company that delivery of the print run is scheduled for sometime next week. FINALLY. I should have a more exact update on the delivery to share with the Friday post.