Q: I remember about a year ago you wrote a post about the decline in quality of Strathmore bristol boards, a brand you used with your work. Whatever happened with that? Did you find a suitable replacement? Have the Strathmore boards improved?

A: Here is the post to which you refer: Strathless Bristol Bored.

I contacted Strathmore about my concerns and found their customer service department very receptive to working with me. They were concerned and, while they didn’t come right out and say it, I got the feeling mine was not the first complaint they had received. They asked me to send them some samples of boards with this problem. I sent them sample boards where the same lines were inked by the same pen nib and the same ink, and yet one board showed the ink clearly bleeding among the fibers while the other looked good. Both were the same 500 series 3 ply kid finish boards, but bought in different batches. I also sent them some 400 boards that were doing the same thing. I demoed several different inks and pen nibs between the two boards. This little demonstration clearly proved it was the board and not the inks causing the issues.

I received an explanation that basically said there was no concrete explanation—yet. There are many chemicals bought from vendor companies that are used through the process of creating the illustration board, and they believed one or more of them had changed their formulas or chemical structure or something that was in turn affecting the results of their process, which had not changed. This made sense, since why would one batch be fine and another bleed when they were both made with the same process? They were trying to figure out which of their vendor’s chemicals might be the culprit, but as yet they did not know.

What they did do was send me a nice supply of good boards, which I am still using today. I spoke with some pretty high ranking executives in the company, and they were both concerned and helpful. I have not had the occasion to buy any boards from an art supply place in a while, so I do not know if they solved their issues or not. I hope so because there isn’t anything that compares to a good Strathmore board out there as a replacement.

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 and I’ll try and answer it here!

Q: I’m enthusiastically working through your book. Aside from enjoying the art and fantastic tips, I’m really interested what you said about it taking 500 faces to really get the nuances of caricature / portraiture.

So to fully understand…. maybe naively so, I have set out to draw 500 faces. I really want to at least begin to recognize all the subtleties you mentioned… and to overcome some of the challenges I’ve faced while drawing portraits. A friend of mine said that it takes 1,000 attempts at a particular activity to beome an expert. My goals isn’t really to become an expert (a half expert is fine with me) so much as to further my own art and to help me grow as a hobbyist.

What else would you recommend artists do to grow and become better at achieving a likeness?

A: I think you are mistaking the difference between caricature and likeness. Here is the quote from the book to which this question refers:

The Mad Art of Caricature, Page 12:

In caricature, the old adage of “practice makes perfect” has never been truer. The ability to see doesn’t spring up overnight, and I often tell eager young caricaturists they have about 500 or so bad caricatures in them before they start noticing the subtle things that hide inside the ordinary face.

By the term “see” I am talking about not necessarily the ability to DRAW or to capture a likeness, which can be done without any exaggeration. I am talking about the ability to observe and notice the things about a face that makes it unique—the things that a caricaturist is going to want to exaggerate to create a caricature as opposed to a portrait. The “500 or so bad caricatures” I say a new caricaturist has in them is not about improving drawing skills or capturing a better likeness, it’s about developing your eye to notice those unique things through the simple medium of observing and then drawing what you observe. Of course the act of drawing over 500 caricatures will also improve an artist’s drawing skills as well as their observational skills as it pertains to simply seeing the facial features that a likeness requires be accurately drawn immensely, but it’s the development of the ‘eye’ to which I refer in that quote.

Additionally, those 500 drawings are not a threshold wherein drawing number 501 is like some switch was suddenly switched on and an artist’s drawings suddenly become successful. I actually use that number with my new theme park artists as saying that is about when they stop fighting with the tools and medium, start getting comfortable in the chair and faces start to look different to them as things jump out that previously went unnoticed. It is still an ongoing process, and at the end of the next 500 drawings, number 1,001 will look very different than 501 did as long as they continue to apply themselves.

Now, as to your actual question about what else (besides practice) an artist can do to improve their ability to capture a likeness…

Nothing. There is nothing else besides unyielding dedication and sheer, unrelenting observing/drawing that will help an artist become better at getting a likeness. Studying and incorporating different techniques are important, and can help an artist along the way, but there are no shortcuts. No amount of studying, reading, watching videos, listening to lectures or other sources of information on drawing can replace the act of drawing and what that does to your ability to make your eyes, hand and brain work together. It’s like swimming. You can read about how to swim, you can look at diagrams of the action, you can watch videos and have classroom instruction in swimming. Until you actually get in the water and start moving around, you will never be able to swim.

That is advice nobody really wants to hear, but it is the absolute truth. Talent is only part of the recipe. The most talented artist in the world would not be more than a mediocre artist if they never bothered to work at developing their skills. Modest talent with enormous work ethic and determination will beat out enormously talented but lazy artists every time.

Thanks to Steven White 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!

Q: I am just starting my career as a freelance artist/illustrator. I just completed a project with a credit union for a character design that they used in their advertisements. When the obvious discussion of pricing came up, I wasn’t sure where to begin. We settled, quite quickly, without any problems. I was just curious if there is any method to the madness?

A: This is a question I get pretty frequently, so every once and a while I re-post this answer from a few years ago.. simply because it’s still as good an answer as I can come up with:

I get individual e-mails occasionally asking for advice on what to charge on this project or that kind of job, and the problem is that the question in basically unanswerable. It is always “that depends”.

By the letter of the law the discussion of how much to charge for the same kind of service or product between two competing sources of said service or product is called “price fixing”, and is quite illegal in the United States. Realistically there needs to be someplace to begin for illustrators just getting into the business. For those people I always recommend the Graphic Artists Guild’s “Pricing and Ethical Guidelines Handbook”. This book has a plethora of information from typical trade practices to copyright considerations to actual comparative fee ranges for different kinds of graphics services including “Magazine Editorial Illustration”, which is broken down into B&W/1 color and color categories for national, medium or small circulations. It also contains very useful generic contract agreements for almost any kind of graphics job, including magazine illustration. The book is a must have for any professional illustrator that wants to know what they are getting into for the contacts alone.

Unfortunately, the very next thing I tell people after recommending the book is to basically forget about the comparative fees they list. My copy of the PaEGH is the 10th edition circa 2001, and most of the fees I’m able to get are just now in the low end of the range they quote. Maybe some magazines actually pay more in the midrange, or the mythical high end range, but I’ve never worked for any. Granted, I don’t have Time, Newsweek, People or Sports Illustrated in my resume, but I’d be surprised if even they paid the kind of rates the PaGEH quote for national circulation. My advice to those who get the book is not to expect to get those kinds of rates unless you have a long resume and are a known name in illustration (like a Payne, Brodner, Cowles or similar). Most of us are not. The lowest end of the rate ranges seem to be the most realistic rates to expect to get in most cases.

Sounds like pricing your illustrations is a guessing game, doesn’t it? The good news is that it rarely is. In fact, it’s my experience that most art directors that call looking for a job to be done have a budget already for the art, and they come clean with you on that budget right away. You either do it for that amount, or turn it down and they move to the next illustrator. This happens with 90% of the jobs I get these days. Art directors don’t want to dicker, or bother trying to hope you will lowball the rate if they ask you to give them a quote. They want the job done, they have X amount of money… interested or not? I will ask an art director what their budget is first, and if they ask me for a quote instead I give them a high one, perhaps the midrange of the PaEGH recommendation. However I find that if I get asked for a quote first one of two things will happen. Either they will say it’s out of their range or they will say it’s higher than they can pay and will I “take X amount instead?”. It’s also been my experience that clients that ask for a quote end up not being very good clients even if the job does come through. Publications that buy art frequently know what they can afford to pay and know what they are doing, and don’t mess around tying to play used car salesman games with freelancers.

If an illustrator gets told what they are going to get paid, then how can they work up to a higher rate and make more money? There are two ways to do this. The best is to become a famous illustrator who’s work is instantly recognizable and who can both dictate their fees and who are called by the biggest publications in the world on a regular basis… good luck with that and when you figure it out write me with your secret. For the rest of us grunts, the only way to raise our rates is to try and move up the food chain as far as the type of client we work for. Since an illustrator is just one person, there is a limit to the volume of work that artist can realistically do. Of course step one is to get to the point that you have more work than you can handle at most times (that doesn’t happen all the time, but to be busy MOST of the time is the goal). It follows then that the only way to get a “raise” is to get more money for the amount of work you can realistically produce, and that means working for larger magazines and publishers. How do you accomplish that? The only way is by working up the food chain, starting by taking jobs from smaller clients. By doing a great job, working hard and being professional, you will gain a reputation as a solid illustrator. Then by marketing yourself to bigger clients, you hopefully will start getting better paying jobs. When that happens you’ll have to start turning down the smaller clients so you have time to do the work for the bigger ones, and so forth.

That sounds easy but it is often the slow work of years to accomplish, unless you are one of the very lucky and skilled illustrators who break in with a bang. The artwork itself is a big factor, of course. You have to be realistic about the professionalism and quality of your work and it’s stylistic appeal to art directors. For example, my work is very cartoon orientated, and as such I probably will never get work from magazines like Time or People, which tend to like either a very painterly, realistic style, a graphic, design orientated style or an artsy, underground style at least in terms of caricature. Unless I alter my style I am probably never going to see my work in those types of magazines. Some illustrators “engineer” a style so what they do is appealing to the current tastes and trends, but they either have to continually reinvent themselves or see their jobs dry up when that flavor of art style becomes passe. The longtime successful illustrators develop a personal style they stick with, and it becomes timeless and remains appealing despite current trends and tastes. That’s the goal, but it’s a lofty one.

While there seems to be a long list of factors and extenuating circumstances, illustration pricing isn’t as complex as it might appear. Most of the time pricing is just a matter of what the client you are working for can afford to pay and what you can afford to do the work for.

Thanks to Chris Grant 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!

Q: Do you do personal commissions? I’d really like to get a caricature done of my wife for a Christmas present. If you do, what does it entail and how much does it cost?

A: Many years ago I stopped doing personal commissions for a number of reasons. First, I didn’t have the time. I am usually swamped with publication work and it’s hard to squeeze in personal commission jobs around the edges. If I were to take them on, it would be at the expense of publication jobs.

The second reason is that I’d have to charge an outrageous fee to do personal commissions. This is because of the previously mentioned reason of having to sacrifice professional jobs in order to get the personal commissions in. I’d have to charge the same sort of rates I’d charge for the publication stuff, and to be honest I’m embarrassed to do that. My average rate for a full-page magazine illustration is about $1200, and a personal commission is comparable to that in time spent. Asking $1200 for a personal commission is, to me, ridiculous. I could name several dozen professional caricaturists who could do just as good a job as I could (or better) for far less than that.

Thirdly, personal commissions are often a real pain in the posterior. Invariably, it’s always a battle with the client over the caricature itself. Usually I am being commissioned to do caricatures of people the client is very close to, often a relative, friend or co-worker. These are people they are in constant contact with and with whom they have the kind of close dynamic I would never be able to duplicate working from a few photos. As a result, there is a often great deal of “this doesn’t quite capture them” or “don’t make them so heavy” that becomes frustrating. I am far from a “mean guy” caricaturist, but I am working cold drawing a person I have never met from a series of sometime lousy photos, trying to capture a person the client knows intimately. The bottom line is I am trying to capture from a bunch or two-dimensional pictures not the way the subject looks but the way the client thinks the subject looks, and that leads to difficulties.

The last real personal commission I had was the one that broke the camel’s back for me. It was probably ten years ago, and I was contacted by a wealthy family from the Hamptons who owned some fancy restaurant in that area, and wanted a family group caricature done for their eatery. After several revisions it became obvious to me these people thought they looked like Bo Derek when they looked a lot more like Bo Diddley. I was even being overly kind to them, and they still demanded some ideal they did not match. I killed the job and have not done another since, with the exception of the occasional one for special occasions, like this one:

I did this as a present for outgoing NCS president Jeff Keane

That said, I am seriously considering changing my policy on this. I might do something like Mort Drucker did when my wife commissioned him to do a caricature of me (something he also rarely, if ever, does). Mort agreed to do a simple pencil rough of me first, and then send it to Anna for approval. If she liked it, he’d do the commission piece as agreed. If she did not, then it would simply end there and he suggested she could look at some MAD originals instead. In other words, no revisions or art direction. That might work for me to do a similar with for an advance on the commission price. If the client likes it, the advance goes toward the final cost and we proceed. If they do not, I keep the advance for my time and they are not obligated further. Might work… I’d be more inclined to consider commission work if I could eliminated the frustration of reason number three above. Something to think about.

Thanks to Bill Johnson 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!

Q: Knowing that you’re a huge Batman fan, which version of Batman (TV or movie) do you feel came closest to living up to the character and who would be your favorite villain? Also, I know you’ve had some of your work animated, but did animation itself ever appeal to you as a career?

A: Please forgive the self-indulgence of answering a more personal opinion question here. Let’s take the second one first, as it’s the more pertinent professional query. I never considered animation as a career because I don’t have the patience for it. I might have been able to do character design given proper study and application, but it just didn’t interest me much. If anything, I think I’d be best at storyboarding animation as I enjoy graphic storytelling more than anything else. I have gigantic respect for those that do work in animation, as it takes enormous talent and skill to do so. I guess I’ll just continue to be a fan of great animation and enjoy it from the theater chair or my couch.

As to the Batman question, this comic I did for the ISCA magazine Exaggerated Features pretty much say it all:

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…


Click for a closer look…

I did that before seeing Batman Begins or, of course, The Dark Knight Returns. I liked the first film a lot and loved the second. Best of the live action stuff IMHO, but nothing beats the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm version from Batman: The Animated Series. The perfect blend of the peak of human physical potential, mental detective skills, use of great wealth for equipment and advantage, and the vengeance driven psyche without going overboard with the darkness and psychotic angle. Greta stories, great style, great show. To be fair, I never watched The Batman, Batman Beyond or The Brave and the Bold shows.

Favorite bat-villain: it’s not a very original opinion but the Joker is the greatest comic book villain ever created. Ever. Period. End-of-story.

Actually, I do love the old 60′s show and can appreciate a comic take on the character. That cartoon above was done from a traditional comic-book fan’s perspective, which usually accounts for zero sense of humor about their beloved characters.

Thanks to John Nelson 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!

Q: I was really impressed with your book, and I also appreciated the reasons you gave as to why you decided to self-publish. I am wondering, though, how are you fulfilling your orders? Are you packaging them up yourself, or using some shipping service? What problems have you encountered in shipping your orders?

A: Actually that was one aspect of the self-publishing process I meant to mention but forgot to in that post you cited. It’s another example of how today’s technology enables a self-publisher to operate as efficiently and quickly as an established distributor.

PayPal has it’s faults, but the tools it brings to the seller are amazing, both in receiving payments and shipping. I already had a merchant account, and was able to quickly and easily create a “Buy Now” feature that included a drop-down menu for options, pre-determined shipping costs that dynamically changed with the buyer’s shipping address and a checkout feature. This allows anyone in any country to purchase the book in any currency with either a Paypal account or an accepted credit card. Once purchased, I get an instant email informing me of the order, which I have routed to a special folder in my inbox. When we do a fulfillment session, which is still once a day at this point, either The Lovely Anna (aka “Shipping and Handling”) or I print out these orders as receipts. Then we log in to PayPal.

Once in our PayPal account, each transaction is listed in chronological order and has a “Print Shipping Label” option listed. Clicking on this allows us to prepare and print out a shipping label as well as pay for postage. One label, with address filled in from the order form, included paid postage, that prints on my desktop printer. We got special self-adhesive labels that are the exact size for the PayPal postage shipping label, with a tear-off other half that contains the shipping receipt and tracking info. If it’s an international shipment, we have an extra customs form step, but it is equally quick and convenient.

Then I sign/draw in the books as directed, we place the receipt in the front of the book, put it in a poly sleeve (bought in bulk from a plastics company), stuff it in the envelope (also bought in bulk from a packaging company) with label affixed, seal the envelope and stack them into a box. The best part? NO WAITING AT THE POST OFFICE. I drop them off in the lobby and then head home. Shipping complete.

I would say this process would be impossible or at least ten times more difficult and time consuming without the automated PayPal selling/shipping tools. I’d had to have paid to get a shopping cart and credit card processing system set up online, had to probably hand address each envelope, or at best type each out in a label-maker program, then stood in line with a box full of books each day and painstakingly did each individually at the post office window. There were days at the beginning of shipping where we did 80-100 books a day catching up on pre-orders. That would have taken hours at the post office, and I would have been lynched by other customers in line behind me.

Yes, it does take time and effort to keep up with the process, but the alternative is to give a fulfillment company/distributor 35% or more of the cover price plus pay for storage. Eventually we may go that route, but for now it’s still kind of fun signing books and dropping them off at the post office, and getting emails from people who are happy with their purchase. I did recently sign with a distributor for libraries, though. Follett Library Resources Inc. and Book Wholesalers Inc. will be carrying my book distributing to K-12 libraries and public libraries respectively.

Thanks to Bill White 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!

Q: Can you share how much time an average project (such as the “workplace posters”) takes you to produce? Does your Cintique make a difference in that timeframe?

A: That’s a question I get often and it’s one that is impossible to answer. Each project is different and factors like multiple revisions, complexity of the image and even just “having a bad drawing day” come into play.

Specifically, I will say one of those workplace posters take me about 1 1/2 to 2 days to do from sketch to final, although complexity of the scene makes a difference. This one:

…took only a long day to do. This one:

…took closer to three days. A page in MAD takes about 2-3 days from rough to final colored art. Splashes about 3-4 days:

Click for a closer look…

Painted illustrations like this one:

…take me a lot longer. I can basically noodle away on these things forever. The one above probably took two days to paint, but I could have spent two more days tightening it up further.

It’s all relative. Some days things just flow off the end of the pencil almost effortlessly, and some days I wear out a whole eraser trying to get one stupid hand right. As for the Cintiq, at first it actually slowed me down as I spent too much time rendering things that ended up printing so small the detail was wasted. Now I have my technique with the Cintiq down, which includes doing most of the rendering/coloring at 50% of zoom, so it does help make things go faster.

Thanks to Nick Nix  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!

Q: What advice would you give on preparing and showing a portfolio for obtaining freelance work?

A: This question isn’t really from anybody specifically, but last week when visiting the Savannah College of Art and Design I did a round-table portfolio review for a group of students, and I thought some of the questions and information disseminated there would make for a good Sunday Mailbag post.

First off, let me say that the era of hauling around and showing a physical portfolio to art directors in pursuit of work is all but over. The term “portfolio” used to mean the leather case containing the bound samples of an artist’s work. Now it simply means the work itself, as more and more “portfolios” are websites. That said, much of the advice that used to apply to those physical portfolios still applies to showing your work to art directors, no matter what way this is done.

Here are what I think are some of the most important elements in preparing showing a portfolio in the pursuit of work:

1. Show them what they want to see, and nothing else- In the case of a specially tailored viewing (i.e. sending or showing work directly to an art director or potential client), do a little research and give some thought to what it is they are looking for. It does you little good to show funny animal illustrations to the art director of a sports magazine. That’s not to say you have to show that art director nothing but sports-related art, but try to focus what you do show them to what is relevant for their needs. In the case of a sports magazine, that would obviously be sports illustrations but also anything with action, caricatures, people or maybe crowd scenes. Also, the type of art they seem to lean towards matters. If most of the illustrations they use are on the realistic side, the goofy cartoon stuff would likely not appeal to them.
2. Leave out the sketches and unfinished work- It might be interesting to show other artists parts of your process, or other aspects of your artwork to show how “well rounded” you are, but art directors don’t care about that stuff. Unless part of what they are looking to hire someone for involves conceptual work or life drawing (like animation work, for example), leave that stuff out. They only want to see finished work that they can imagine printed in their publication or incorporated into their project.
3. Don’t overwhelm them with too many pieces- Fifteen to Twenty pieces are enough for them to get a solid idea of your abilities. Too many and it gets too long and arduous for the art director to slog through. Too few and it looks like you haven’t done much work.
4. Include as many published pieces as possible- Also either use an actual tear sheet or printout of the finished layout (type and graphics included). At worst include a label with client name and publication date. Any published pieces are like gold in your portfolio because it demonstrates to the client you have completed a job for a client, met a deadline and did work that met with client approval and was published/used.
5. Start and end the portfolio with your best pieces- This is an old cliche but a good one. You want to start and end strong, as that both gets the art director’s attention at the beginning and leaves them with a (hopefully) memorable piece at the end. The success of a portfolio showing is measured not by how impressed the art director is at the time they see it, but by how long they remember your work as the days (and potential jobs) go by.

The prevalence of virtual portfolios makes some of those points harder to accomplish, but they are still important. It might be easy to put up every single piece of art you have ever done in your website portfolio, but that is not wise. You can and should have more pieces up than twenty, but many dozen are too much. I keep my online portfolio limited to 45 pieces, which is plenty of pieces but still manageable to go through… especially using the scrolling thumbnail feature I have incorporated into my website design.

I always thought it would be a great feature on someone’s website to allow for a private portfolio section, where an artist can send an email link to an art director and invite them to look at a specially tailored selection of pieces just for them. That might be too much work to do very often, but it would allow an artist to put together a perfect amount of well-selected pieces to show.

Thanks to Nobody in Particular, MN  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!

Q: You must have accumulated a ton of digital artwork since you’ve been working as a professional illustrator. How do you go about saving, backing up and archiving your files so that you never lose them?

A: That’s one of the things that sucks about digital artwork—you are one electrical surge away from losing it all unless you are careful to back things up.

I tried several methods to make sure I properly backed up all my work. First, I would pick up my computer, open the drive bay door and attempt to shake out all the 0′s and 1′s that made up the binary code of my art files, scoop them up and keep them in empty coffee cans in my basement. This did not work well because all those 0′s and 1′s got all over the place and I was sure I’d lose some and when I poured them back in later to reconstitute my image, Harry Plodder’s nose would be missing or something. Worse, those 0′s and 1′s were apparently so small I couldn’t even see them, and I was afraid no matter how hard I shook the computer some would be stuck in there. So, I abandoned that idea.

Next, I thought I’d print the binary data out on paper, put them in folders and file them away. That way, although I’d have to retype it all should my original files get lost (no big deal, how long could that take?), they’d be safe for posterity. This idea I also abandoned when my first attempt to print the binary code of a MAD page went through an entire ream of paper before my printer started smoking and I pulled the plug.

Finally, I decided to everything up on DVDs. This is also not the best method, as DVDs apparently deteriorate or at least as technology becomes more advances and formats change, early DVDs become harder to read. My newer Macs don’t like my very oldest DVDs anymore. I had to use a friend’s computer to read these files and transfer them to a thumb drive to store elsewhere.

These days I have a double redundant backup plan. I have two external hard drives hooked to my studio computer. One is used as a Mac OS X “Time Machine” drive, which in general backs up all my files. The other drive uses a program called SuperDuper that backs up just my documents and art files daily. That was all three drives would need to fail at once to lose anything.

Eventually I might turn to cloud storage for another alternative. These files are big and it would take a long time to back this up on Dropbox or similar, but having an offsite storage plan would even guard against fire or some other localized natural disaster

Bottom line- BACK UP YOUR FILES. Disaster will strike, eventually.

Thanks to Matthew Cox 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!

Q: I know you do a lot of different kinds of humorous illustration, but you are primarily known for doing caricatures. What first got you interested in drawing caricatures? Was it something you started doing as a kid, or did you discover it later?

A: I started typing out an answer to this one, then realized that the following excerpt from the preface of my book said it better, and I’d already written it!…

From The Mad Art of Caricature!:

When I was a young man, drawing caricatures for a living never struck me as something I was interested in doing. I never opened a magazine and saw a great caricature of some celebrity and realized in a forehead-slapping moment of epiphany, that’s what I want to do! In fact, I wasn’t even aware caricature was an art form. The whole thing kind of snuck up on me, and the people to blame are Mr. Chilson and the Fasen Brothers.

Mr. Chilson was my seventh-grade art teacher at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1979. The school was so small that we had our art classes in the same room they held the shop classes, sitting on barstools at tall worktables, while another grade’s art class was going on at the same time on the other side of the large workshop. One day Mr. Chilson started a lesson on caricature. I was sitting in the back, not paying attention, as usual, and drawing in my notebook. While Mr. Chilson was explaining what a caricature was, I was drawing one of the other teacher, who was only a few dozen feet away from me . . . except I didn’t know it was a caricature. To me, it was just my drawing of the other teacher.

“RICHMOND!” Mr. Chilson yelled in my ear. “You are in THIS class, not THAT one!” He was standing next to me. One of the drawbacks of being absorbed in a drawing at the expense of paying attention in class was that I never heard the teacher coming. That resulted in many startling yells in my ear. He snatched away the notebook, glanced at it, glared at me, and then instructed me loudly in front of everybody to see him after class as he returned to the front of the room with my confiscated notebook in hand. Resigned to getting detention at the least, I meekly hung back and watched my schoolmates shuffle out following the bell.

Instead of giving me detention, Mr. Chilson sent me around the school over the next several days to draw about two dozen of the teachers, and then he displayed my work in the glass case at the top of the stairs right in front of the art/shop room.  I guess he liked my drawing of the other art teacher—or maybe he hated the guy and sent me around to draw all the other teachers he disliked so they could be ridiculed publicly and I’d be to blame. I was never sure. Regardless, that was my first exposure to the art of caricature, as well as my first understanding of what caricature was.

I then promptly forgot all about caricature for about six years.

In 1985, I was at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, attempting to study commercial art. It had been a year or so, and I’d had only one art class as they were impossible to get into as an underclassman, and the one I was “lucky” enough to get into was a complete waste of time. “Alternative Sculpture” was one of those art classes that was 99% pretension and 1% actual, useful art instruction. I was skipping it one day, hanging about the commons area, when I spied a flyer on the wall asking “Can You Draw?” It ended up being an ad seeking caricature artists to draw at the local amusement park for a company called Fasen Arts. I suddenly recalled Mr. Chilson and my seventh-grade show and thought this would make a great summer job. I secured an interview and dragged an overflowing folder of drawings I’d done from some magazine photos with me to meet with Steve Fasen, an accomplished caricaturist and the owner of Fasen Arts.

I didn’t get the job.

Some weeks later Steve called and offered me a spot at a different theme park near Chicago, about 450 miles southeast. I was later told this opportunity opened up only because someone else had backed out, but that hardly would have mattered to me at the time—nor does it matter in hindsight. I packed up my things and moved to Waukegan, Illinios, where I spent the summer drawing caricatures with a group of very talented artists headed by Steve’s brother Gary, a brilliant caricaturist and illustrator. There I learned a great deal about drawing and cartooning, discovered the realities of making a living as an artist, renewed my appreciation for a certain magazine that would later become an important part of my life, and, most importantly, fell in love with the art of caricature completely and for good.

That pretty much sums it up, except to add that I continued to draw caricatures all through grade and high school, although I wasn’t really conscious what I was doing was “caricature’. I was just drawing funny pictures of my friends and teachers. I did a series of comic stories casting myself and my high school friends as infants but imbuing them with our current personality traits and faults. Those were caricatures, in a way. Lord knows I got in trouble a few times for drawing my teachers in less-than-complimentary ways. Still, I was pretty dense and never put the term “caricature” and what I was doing together until that job at Six Flags.

Thanks to Rich Griffin 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!