Plenty on the board right now-

• MAD job- TV show parody, due… oh crap! Tomorrow!! By the way, this parody represents the first “continuity” (meaning movie or TV show parody) I’ve done since I did “Watchmen” about this time last year. That sucks.
• Workplace Poster- My usual monthly assignment
• Animated film segment storyboards- After designing the animated characters for RG Entertainment’s new movie, I am now storyboarding the animated four scenes from the otherwise live action film. One scene down and three to go.
• Movie Poster- This got put on hold while I do the storyboards.

Here is the pencil sketch and final art for last month’s workplace poster. Not one of the more inspired themes…

Rough pencil sketch

Final Art

Here is a series of spot illustrations I did a few months ago for Penthouse for their February issue. They are illustrating a “timeline” feature similar to the one I did for St. Patrick’s Day about a year ago. This timeline follows a typical guy’s day on Superbowl Sunday. Here are a few of them, pencil roughs and finals:

Breakfast of Champions: hot wings

Checking out the neighbor’s hot wife! She is… OOOH! NACHOS!

Getting pissed at the hipsters

The inevitable end of the evening

I did a few extra sketches and the editors chose the six they liked the best (only four pictured, you’ll have to buy the latest issue of Penthouse to see the rest… if your wife/girlfriend will let you that is). Here are the two that didn’t make the cut:

Overeating… Superbowl tradition

This was going to show a caricature of Chris Berman on the TV screen, since apparently real sports fans hate his schtick. I didn’t bother to draw him as I knew this one probably wouldn’t get chosen… too confusing a gag.

Q: During the last 15 years what caricature or drawing skill have you developed the most?

A: All of them.

I debated whether to use this question, as that is really the only answer. I don’t know what else to tell you. As an artist, unless you completely focus on only one thing to the exclusion of all else (faces for example), you are going to improve your overall drawing skills with constant work and practice. It’s gratifying to be able to look at work I did 15, 10, 5 or even just a few years ago and see glaring faults that today would never have gone unnoticed and uncorrected. Growth as an artist is the most exciting thing to see. It makes all the hard work put in to achieve that growth worthwhile.

Want to see an example? Here is a page from an issue of NOW comic’s Married… with Children featuring Christina Applegate from 1992, so this is 17 years old:

Ugh.

Now here’s a page from my parody of two years ago of “Samantha Who?” from MAD, also featuring Christina Applegate… so this is 15 years of improvement under my belt:

Not the best example but I can certainly see a huge difference in virtually every aspect of the work… caricatures, expression, visual energy, composition and layout, storytelling, perspective… just plain ol’ better drawing.

The best part? Even after just two years I see lots of things in this more recent piece that I’d have changed or made different if I were doing it today. Christina’s face in panel one is awkward, and her hand is gigantic. The expression and head angle is also too similar to the one in panel two, and I should have changed one or the other. The standard “pointy finger” pose is something I used to screw up a lot by making the index finger too big for the rest of the hand, as in panels one and five. The window/floor position in panel five is confusing. Etc.

I’ve always said if you look at something you did five years ago and are not dissatisfied with it, or better yet downright embarrassed by it,  you aren’t trying hard enough.

Thanks to Robert Sharp 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: My question is about the placement of the people you draw in a humorous illustration. I know you have to deal with art directors that probably help a little, but how do you decide where to place the people, props, etc? And is there a way to learn how to get to the “placement” decision faster and at the same time relaying the message you are trying to make to the viewer? Is there a book or coarse that will help, or just keep looking at the art of other artist like yourself?

A: Composition is one of those things that is difficult to teach to someone because there are so many elements that come into play yet there are few hard and fast rules to adhere to. It’s a little like trying to explain how to ride a bike. When you are on a bike, you can feel when you are balanced and you can feel when you are going to tip over. I follow no real conscious formula when it comes to composing an illustration… it’s all about achieving that feeling of “it’s working”. Yet composition is the weakness of many a terrific artist.

When I consider the composition of a single illustration I really have no rules or guidelines or anything I can explain as to where my composition comes from. Basically I read over the art direction, start visualizing in my head and then do several sketches as experiments for composition. It is very much a feel-as-I-go process. The only things I really consciously think about are three main elements: focus, balance and tangents.

Focus-

Focus is simply what is supposed to be the most important thing about the illustration… what is the message? What is the element I want people to focus on? That should be be the centerpiece of the illustration. That means it’s literally in the center or where ever your eye is drawn to in the piece. This can be accomplished in so many ways it’s impossible to list them all. You can have the eyes and reactions of any figures in the image leading to the focus. You can position objects or negative space between objects to lead to the focus. You can use contrast, color or lighting to bring attention to the focus. Every “scene” presents some way of accomplishing this, so it is a matter of solving the problem for a specific illustration.

Balance-

This is simply the overall solid and substantial feel of an image… the balance. Like my bike riding analogy, this is really more of a sense than it is a calculation. Just like you sense yourself being balanced or tipping over on the edge of some object, looking at an illustration I sense if things are not balanced. Then I adjust things by adding or subtracting elements to the illustration, until that sense of balance returns. Like focus, each image is different and how you achieve balance is unique to the illustration.

Tangents-

Finally I check things over to try and make sure I avoid tangents, which are bad for composition. A tangent is when the contours of two objects touch or almost touch in a given image, creating an awkward juxtaposition which interferes with the depth and readability of the illustration. It creates confusion as to what object is in front of what other object, and is distracting. You fix this by either separating the objects in question or by overlapping them more significantly.

Avoiding tangents is composition 101, but that’s the only composition class I had and the rest has been all faking it for 20 some odd years.

The best I can tell  you is when you have a sketch of an illustration laid out, tack it up on the wall, step back from it and take a good look. Is it awkward? Is it heavy on some side or another? If so you need to work on the composition.

Thanks to Lee Fortuna 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!

Lot’s of projects going on the board right now…

• Animation Character Designs- Political caricatures to be used for some animated segments in a documentary, wrapping those up this week.
• Personal Commission- I was honored to be asked by a cartoonist I greatly respect to do a caricature of a famous friend of her’s as a birthday present. I might be doing this digitally now.
• Movie Poster- A very simple design and illustration for previously mentioned documentary
• Movie Storyboards- More work on that documentary, now I’m doing the storyboards for the animated sequences as well!
• Workplace poster job- my usual monthly assignment

Last Wednesday I posted as my sketch o’the week the pencil rough for last month’s poster illustration job. Here’s the final inks and color image for that project:

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

Looks like I only have about 5 more years of doing these monthly before I can have another “Great Art Blowout Sale”.