Q: When you work from reference materials, the facial expressions of the people are rarely (never) what you need to incorporate into your drawings. Are there any principles you can give for altering facial expressions to comic proportions and situations while still retaining a good likeness?

A: It’s very true that if I were to need to rely on finding the exact angle and facial expression of a given actor in order to pull off a recognizable caricature of them for a given panel in a MAD parody, I’d never get anything done. Instead I gather up multiple references of an actor from various angles, assemble them into a single page and use them as a basis for all my caricature… but not necessarily as exact reference. I have a technique I use for the MAD “continuity” work that I have already imparted here on The MAD Blog, but it’s been a while so here it is again for those who didn’t catch it the first time:

References used for caricatures or any illustration job are meant to be an assistance, not a crutch. If I cannot create an illustration of something without a photograph showing me the exact image, angle and lighting I am looking for my effectiveness as an illustrator would certainly be compromised. I use references just to see how things work, to pick up details and aspects I might not otherwise realize existed and to help me make my drawing more convincing, not as the entire basis for everything I draw. It’s a little like a writer using a dictionary or thesaurus to find a word for use in his story, or reading articles or books to learn about facts or details of the subjects he is writing about. The story he writes is his creation, but he might do some research to write more convincingly about a given topic. If I need to draw a building, I might refer to some pictures of buildings to see how the windows, trim, stonework and such might work and be added to my drawing to make it look more like the kind of building I am trying to draw, but I don’t need to find the exact angle and view of every building I want to draw in order to make it work. In fact I will often change things even from a direct photo reference for reasons of composition or effectiveness in what I am trying to achieve with the illustration.

The same goes for caricatures. If I have several pictures of a subject from several different angles, I can draw their face multiple times at different angles than those shown me in the pictures by using what I have learned of their face from the existing references. When it comes to expressions, faces all have the same basic muscles and tend to have the same reactions with respect to emotions and expression, so by combining those elements I can draw the same face with different expressions and still maintain a cohesive likeness.

With respect to a MAD parody, the trick to doing this is twofold. First, I need to find several important features that are “keys” to the specific face I am doing multiple drawings of, and carry them through each different caricature even as I take liberties with the expressions. It might be heavy eyebrows, the squareness of a chin, the head shape (usually an important one) or any one of many such things that make the particular face unique. These become linchpins that make the viewer believe they are looking at the same character in each panel. Usually the crazier the expression I am drawing, the more I have to rely on these “keys” to keep the cohesion.

The second part of the equation is what I call the “keystone” technique. Basically what this means is that, at several points through the parody, I incorporate a caricature of a subject drawn from specific photo reference. These caricatures are always more detailed and have the strongest likenesses of the lot. These are always found on the splash page (those being the “intro” keystones) and then here and there throughout the rest of the parody. They act as “keystones” or “cornerstones” that bridge the gap between the ones where I am faking it with expressions and angles I don’t have specific references for. They keep up the viewer’s perception that the same character is being seen throughout. Jack Davis used to use this technique all the time with his MAD parodies, except he’d often just do the one keystone caricature on the splash and then do a cartoon representation of the character for the rest of the parody. I’m not Jack Davis, so I do more than one keystone caricature.

As far as expression goes, you can exaggerate and impose almost any expression on a caricatured face and maintain a passable likeness as long as you keep those keystone elements strong and easily readable. I have a small mirror in front of my drawing table and will sometimes make faces in it to get an idea of what happens to the basic muscles and features for a given expression. I can transfer what I have observed onto the existing caricature structure. Another great resource for that is to find the same actor in a previous movie on DVD. Looking at them move and speak gives you a lot more understanding of their mannerisms and facial expressions than static photos do… and maybe even a glimpse at a few extreme expressions.

Thanks to Daniel Moir 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!

Here’s wishing health and happiness to all for 2009.

I did this little doodle as an experiment with a new technique I am working on. It involves using colored lines as opposed to traditional black inked lines for a digitally colored piece. It’s hardly a new concept, but I have only attempted it a few times and in different ways with mixed results. The above was done by inking the drawing in the traditonal way and then scanning as always, but then replacing the black ink color with other colors. It produces a slightly more painted and softer look.

Just a quick post today. Here is this week’s political caricature for The Independent. It will appear in tomorrow’s column both online and in print.

I’d love to do more newspaper illustration. Unlike magazine work, it’s much more of a “quick and dirty” sort of exercise. Often you get only a day or so to do the job. It’s less intense because the images need to be relatively simple due to the restrictions of printing on newsprint, and the short deadlines mean you donlt have time to rethink everything over and over. It doesn’t pay all that well (especially these days) compared to magazines or especially advertising, but the reduced time involved sort of evens that out.

The only other newspaper work I’ve done, outside of work for the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Daily college newspaper back when I was a student, was this piece for the Star Tribune last spring. They either didn’t like the final results, or they didn’t find the budget to do more sports illustrations because I got no return calls from them. Oh well…

Two big jobs wrapped up yesterday, which leaves a new project for Penthouse (no naughty stuff, just funny) and more of the column header caricatures for The Independent on the board right now.

I can’t share the Fade In job until publication, but as always the client for the workplace poster jobs doesn’t mind my posting the images I do for them upon completion. So here is the latest of those posters:

Initial Pencil

The job was to do an image of a harried looking nurse thinking about a relaxing getaway on a beach, being served hand and foot. The first pencil rough above needed some changed after art direction. They wanted the nurse to look less harried and more dreamy thinking of her getaway, and some changes to the beach scene…

Pencil round two

Final art. Click for a closer look…

Final art above done in my line and color style. In this particular case I did the background, “dream cloud” and nurse/foreground on separate layers for online animation purposes by the client.

The Penthouse job will be fun… it involves St. Patrick’s Day. I am quite sure I won’t be able to share that here until publication but it will serve as a good post for March.

Pretty busy right now, which is a nice problem to have these days. Nothing for MAD yet so barring a last minute job from them it looks likely I will not be in issue #499… I sure hope I am given something for issue #500, which is going to be a big deal.

Plenty to work on, though. I just finished up a couple of spot illustration jobs and a personal commission for a local corporation of their president. Here’s what’s on the board with now:

The Independent- North Carolina news publication (print and online) where I am illustrating a political column with local politician caricatures. Ongoing and weekly job.

Workplace poster- Not as ambitious as the last one but a fun one nonetheless. Dealing with stress at work, specifically the health care industry.

Fade In Magazine- Full page and series of spots on a story dealing with discrimination in the movie industry.

Scholastic- Just finished these two spot illustrations for a feature about President Andrew Jackson, Scholastic doesn’t mind my sharing the work I do with them prior to publication:

Click for a closer look…

This short tutorial is a just a small taste of a larger and much more in-depth book I wrote called The Mad Art of Caricature! The book is 175 full-color pages, lavishly illustrated and contains greatly expanded explanations of the concepts presented in this tutorials, as well and a great deal of additional material on caricaturing other facial features, posture, hands, expression and more, techniques on drawing from live models, doing caricature for freeplace illustration and for MAD Magazine. This is a must have book for anyone interested in caricature, cartooning or humorous illustration. You can order it online here.

How to Draw Hands

Easily the most asked question I get is “how do you draw caricatures?”. However a close runner up is “how do you draw hands?”.  I’m not exactly the king of drawing hands, but I have made a special study of them as they are very important when doing comic book type work… hands and their gestures are a big part of “acting” and therefore of storytelling.

Next to faces, hands are probably the most expressive and intricate part of the human form. In fact, humans probably spend more time looking at their hands than they do looking at anything else over their entire lives. Being that we are all so familiar with the way hands look, a poorly drawn hand sticks out like a sore thumb (sorry about the pun). Oddly enough, hands are something that most artists struggle to draw well. So, with that in mind I thought I’d do a tutorial on my approach to drawing hands.

I’m a cartoonist at heart, so the hands I draw are not realistic hands by most definitions. However my style of cartooning lends itself more to realistic representation than, say, a certain four fingered gloved mouse or other much more cartoony characters do. Therefore a lot of the information in this tutorial will apply to drawing hands realistically as well as in more cartoon form. I’ll attempt to explain the basic anatomy of a hand, things to keep in mind at all times when drawing them and common mistakes and issues that plague many artists when drawing hands.

Breaking Down Hand Structure

As with drawing anything, it all starts with an understanding of the basic form and structure of your subject matter. Hands are certainly no different. In fact, many of the most common problems with drawing hands stems from incorrect notions of the form of the hand. I’m not a big stickler for memorizing the names of muscles and bones because it seems to zone people out when you start tossing around “Carpal this” and “Metatarsal that”… however labels are something that some people need to be able to apply, so some general surface anatomy with layman’s terms seems to be the best approach. Here is a breakdown of a hand with the important surface elements labeled:

Not really much to it, is there? Everybody knows what knuckles and fingernails are. Where an artist gets tripped up is not understanding how they relate to one another, and how they move in relationship to one another when the hand starts doing it’s thing. Things like how the knuckles line up, where the pad creases fall, how the fingers bend and interact… these are all important elements to drawing convincing hand gestures. (more…)

Q:  After all of these years of cartooning, I should know this, but one of the biggest issues I have when it comes to drawing and cartooning is when I erase something on my bristol board it ruins that area (that I erased in) when it comes down to inking it.  What happens is that area that I erased in ends up creating awful, bleeding lines (or runny) from my ink, therefore not allowing me to have control and achieve the desired effect.  I’m always afraid to erase too much.  I don’t erase ‘rough’ or anything, and I use Strathmore 300 series Vellum.  I realize that this happens largely in part because the eraser takes away the texture of the paper.  So, the question is, what do you recommend I do to fix this?  Is there some kind of ‘magic’ paper out there that can handle an eraser better, or is it best to NOT erase and work around mistakes–erasing when completed?  Basically, what do you recommend?

A: This question comes from Nate Fakes, a cartoonist, writer and fellow member of the Usual Gang of Idiots! Thanks for the question, Nate!

Just to clarify: your problem is that you are penciling on Strathmore 300 board, do some corrective erasing and further penciling, and then when you ink on top of the pencils you have bleeding and fuzzy lines in the areas you erased on. I just wanted to make sure the that was clear, and your issue was not that the inks smeared when you later erased the pncil lines way after inking.

The bottom line is that should not happen. You must be able to erase and make corrections at the pencil stage. I am pretty sure the problem is yourbioard. Strathmore 300 is not a very good board… I’d call it a “student grade” board, good enough for layouts, experimentation and studies but not consitant enough for pro work. If you are going to use real ink with a dip pen or brush as opposed to a marker or brush pen, get at least Strathmore 400 series. If the texture of the paper is not important to the look you are going for, get smooth (plate) finish as opposed to vellum. That has a much better surface for smooth inking. Also use 3 ply thickness or heavier… the thicker plys seem to have the better weave. Also buy the indivudal baords as the bound tablets are not the surface you need to work on.

Unfortunately Strathmore has really lost quality control in the last few years. I’ve learned the hard way not to buy too large a quantity of Strathmore board at a time, as some batches are badly woven. Right now I have a stack of 500 series Strathmore that is practically useless as I get the bleeding you described no matter what on every piece. MAD had a batch like that a year or two ago and it was awful. Lot’s of “fixing” the lines in PhotoShop. ugh. That stuff is too expensive to put up with those kinds of issues.

It seems like any cartoonist you talk to that has been in the business for a long time will lament the poor quality of art supplies these days. Nibs, ink, paper, etc. are just not made the way they used to be. This is not a new phenomenon. Charles Schulz used an Esterbrook Radio pen #914 for his work, and when the company went out of business he purchased enough nibs to last the rest of his life. I know a few other cartoonists who own and horde pen nibs or other art supplies that have been discontinued because they can’t stand the later maufactured versions.

Strathmore’s issue seem to be batch related, so if you get a bad board or two return the rest or at least seek new board from a different source. I’m going to be forced to get a new pack of 500 series as this stuff I have is almost unuseable. I prefer the vellum surface as I like what the imperfections and texture add to my inks, but to each their own. The point is seek a better surface as there are enough challenges to overcome in any given job withotu fighting poor materials.

Thanks again to 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 and I’ll try and answer it here!

My “job shadow” watches as I ink a MAD job

I do a fair amount of speaking to local middle school, high school and occasionally college classes about cartooning and illustration… usually a handful of times a year or so. I also host internships for college art students at my theme park operations where they work as caricaturists for the summer and get college credits. This past week I did something I’ve never done before: “job shadow”.

Job shadow is a high school program where a student finds a professional working in whatever field interests them and then “shadows” them on the job for all or part of a day. Then they write a report on the experience. We sort of had this in school as well, but it was “bring your kid to work day” and we just went to work with a parent and then did a report on it. My dad was the manager of a grocery store, which interested me not at all, so I sat in the store break room and drew all day. “Job shadow” is a little more specific.

My niece Brittanie called me up and said she had a classmate who was an aspiring artist and wondered if he could job shadow me one day… like TOMORROW. I was trying to beat a deadline on a MAD job and was on the final stretch of the inking, so I thought that would work out well. The next day a young man named Luke showed up at the studio and spent about 4 hours watching me ink while we chatted about freelance illustration, cartooning, caricature, MAD and in general what it’s like to try and make a living with a pencil and a drawing board. Fortunately my two decades of drawing live caricatures trained me in the fine art of talking and drawing at the same time… and being able to draw with someone looking over my shoulder. It’s funny but all the live caricaturists I know take it for granted that everyone can do that, but in reality a lot of cartoonists can’t draw in front of people at all.

Luke and me

Anyway it went by fast and Luke was a very attentive student. He asked a lot of good questions. I hope he got something out of it.

All you pro cartoonists out there should contact your local high school and let them know you are available for something like that. I sure wish I would have had that opportunity when I was a senior in high school.

I have several irons in the fire at the moment but here’s the latest “workplace poster” job I just completed last week. This one was a killer.

Here’s the art direction and tagline:

(Urban street scene. It’s Feb. 14. Maybe there’s Times-Square-style zipper that says, ‘Happy Valentine’s Day today!’ Looking up on either side of the street you can see a flower shop, a bookstore, a jewelry store and a candy store. It’s a mob scene, with men and women (diversity, please) frantically running in the streets with cards and last-minute gifts, sweating and carrying their packages. Men carrying flowers and jewelry bags, a woman carrying a puppy, another woman pushing a new, shiny, zooted-up gas grill down the middle of the street. You could even have a cop or two directing pedestrian traffic. Everyone’s looking frazzled. It’s the last minute to buy a gift. No cars in the street, please.):

“If you want to have a sweetheart of a day, don’t procrastinate! Come on – pace yourself on (and off) the job, and avoid pushing the envelope! Here’s to planning ahead … keeping a cool head … and giving yourself time afterwards to relax and smell the roses.“

Well, not much to say about that. Some jobs call for a relatively easy image and some call for something like this. An illustrator is paid for usage not for time it takes to complete a piece, so the paycheck is the same whether I spend two days on one of these poster jobs or two weeks. I consider it to all “come out in the wash” in the end, meaning there are very easy and quick jobs that balance out these more complex ones so it all evens out over time. This one was a killer, though… did I say that already?

Here is the rough pencil sketch:

Click for a closer look…

I have been working for this client for many years now (in fact so long I have lost count of the number of these posters I have done… somewhere in the forty or fifty range by now at least) that I no longer do any thumbnails or multiple roughs for review. I just go straight into a single solution. I know what they want and they know what to expect from me, so there are seldom any major changes.

Obviously the point of this image was a frenzied scene with people rushing to get last minute valentines gifts. I know the client will not like anyone looking “too crazy” or panicked, nor will they want to see any violence like people getting trampled or pushed aside. They like a blend of caricature/cartoon character people, lots of diversity in sex, race and age, and lots of strong color in the final. My layout uses a tilted angle of the scene to create more chaos, and then just fills the space with various people scurrying about.

Here are the final inks:

Click for a closer look…

I spot some blacks here and there but as this is going to be color I only do a little value work with the inks (i.e. solid blacks, linear or crosshatch shading, etc.)

I saved the image in a partially colored stage:

I work from the background forward with the color, which is very important. In a crowd scene you must alter your colors from the foreground to the background to help create some depth. The farther back you go, the less saturated or intense the color and the less contrast it contains. I will add a blue cast of varying strength to the color of the figures in the back until they become nearly monochromatic.

Here’s the final image:

Click for a closer look…

Crowd scenes are something I’ve garnered somewhat of a reputation of being good at. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse, as they are a serious pain in the ass to do. If you think this one is complex, that’s nothing. Right now I am working on one for MAD that makes this one look like two kids playing in a sandbox. The good news is that I am going to spend a little extra time on it to set it up as a tutorial for how to design and illustrate a crowd scene. Look for that one once that issue of MAD is on the stands in January.