It’s rare that I don’t do any posting on The MAD Blog on any day but Saturday, but yesterday I was completely swamped after an all-nighter sunday night/Monday morning and some furious painting on a magazine cover illustration due yesterday afternoon. Then I passed out. Still recovering but on two two other jobs due ASAP, having just finished up a bunch of jobs in the last three weeks since getting back from vacation. Here’s what I’ve done since Feb 22th:

• NCS Reuben Weekend Illustration- See here
• 6 page MAD TV parody for #509- Another fun one of another popular show
• Illustration for the Food Network- Unknown if I can ever share this, it was for some in-house project
• Workplace Poster illustration- My usual assignment
• Sculpture turnaround design- For promo item for “I Want Your Money” film
• Magazine cover for Utne Reader- On news stands in April, will share when appropriate

Here’s what I’ve still got on the board right now:

• Jeff Dunham illustrations- Pencil revisions on two images today and finishing one final tonight
• Bobble Rep caricatures- A few of the 105 heads of new congress members for the iPhone app, due this week
• Workplace poster- Yep, already have my new assignment there.

I need another vacation.

Here’s some of the images from the above completed jobs I can share:

Workplace Poster Illustration- Click for a closer look…

Q: With freelancing for magazines and stuff, is there a time of year that is always busier than others? Is there one that is slower? If so, why?

A: I’ve noticed over the years that the first few months of the year and October were busier than others, and November/December were always the slowest months when it came to getting freelance illustration jobs. The discrepancy was obvious enough that I finally asked one of my art directors why that might be. He told me it was all about budgets.

Most magazines and periodicals operate under budgets for things like illustration, freelance writing, etc. They get X amount of money to spend on that kind of content. By the end of the year they are out of budget money and can’t buy much illustration. Early in the year they have fresh budgets and, having gone without much illustration in a few issues, go on a little shopping spree. October is busy because that’s when publications are working on their “year end” issues, which are often their biggest issue of the year and generally eat up whatever illustration budget they had left. The rest of the year is pretty consistent.

With regards to being busier at some times over others, as an illustrator who does a lot of caricature any big national election year tends to make the late summer/early fall busier.

Thanks to Steven B. 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

Click for a closer look…

There are a lot of magazines I’d really like to do work for, but high on that list has always been Sports Illustrated Kids. I was therefore thrilled when I got a call from SI Kid’s art director asking if I was available to do a piece for them. The project was a two page spread featuring caricatures of several pro athletes engaging in the jobs they were quoted as saying they’d like to have if they weren’t professional athletes. The result is the image above, which appears in the March 2011 issue on news stands now.

Here’s one of the rounds of pencil sketchs placed in the mock layout they sent me:

Click for a closer look…

And here are closer looks at the individual athletes:

Washington Mystics guard Katie Smith

A very fun project. Hopefully the first of many.
 

Q: Has your PC ever gone down in the middle of a big job\tight deadline? How do you handle this? Has travel ever affected you meeting a deadline?

Yes, I once had my hard drive melt on me in the middle of doing two big jobs. It went down on a Monday while I was working on a job due that day and had a MAD job to finish by Wednesday. The disaster happened to my formerly trusty Dell Workstation… here’s my blog post from that day:

Well, it finally happened. This morning I am coloring happily along in PhotoShop when the blue screen of death pops up on my PC monitor. For the most part Windows XP is a very stable OS and I sometimes go weeks without rebooting, but this one was bad. I instantly lost all the work I had been doing as the computer began dumping physical memory to reboot. Unfortunately it went downhill from there.

Apparently my Dell workstation uses a hard drive configuration called “RAID”, which as I understand it is for drive mirroring and server/data security. I don’t need those things, but they came with the system so I had them anyway. As it turns out, RAID drives are specially configured, and when your RAID goes south so does your drives… and all the data on them. So, my computer went from a fire-breathing graphics monster to a useless pile of crap in .5 seconds. I have to get “Grey’s Anantomy” done by Wednesday and was supposed to have a poster job done by today.

This was an emergency. I could not afford not to be working on this today. I could go to Best Buy and get a crappy PC anytime, but getting a good PC with the right hardware is not as easy. So, being down on PC’s anyway at the moment, I went to the one place in town I could walk in, buy a computer that would have the graphics firepower to do what I needed and get home in time to get back to it… yep, I went to the Apple Store.

Came home with a souped up Mac Pro with 4 GB ram, 2 x 3.0 Ghz processors and a 512 MB graphics card. I figured I’d see if those commercials about opening the box and starting to use the computer were accurate. Let’s just say that after one automatic firmware upgrade download, one firmware installation crash, one hour on the phone with tech support and a total reinstall of the system software I am still not using it and those commercials are a load of garbage. Right out of the box my ass.

Well, back to the cyber-battle. If I blow my deadlines I will be very angry with Michael Dell and Steve Jobs, in that order. This may put a damper on blog entries in the foreseeable future….

I eventually got the Mac Pro working that day, and finished both jobs on time. That happened in 2006, and just a few months ago I retired that Mac Pro and got a new 27″ iMac, so I stuck with Apple.

Dealing with deadlines when traveling is all about making sure your travel won’t be a problem for the deadlines. I usually get behind on my jobs and need to pull and all-nighter or three to get caught up, so I do my best to get that out of the way before I travel. Then if needed I bring whatever I need to keep on track with me. Hopefully that is nothing, but as I hate being totally behind after a trip I usually bring some project along to mess about with… The Lovely Anna likes to sleep in and I like to get up early on vacations, so I have some quiet time in the mornings to get stuff done.

Thanks to Leo Kelly 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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

This is my cover illustration for Reason magazine’s March 2011 issue featuring California’s new (well, technically his third term but his last two were from 1975-1983) Jerry Brown. The above is the original cover with the state labels but the magazine’s editors decide we needed to drop the labels for the printed version. The article it was accompanying was about how California was separating itself from the surrounding west states politically.

Here are some of the rough concept pencils for the job… all variations on the same basic scene which was agreed on earlier:

The folks at Reason were fun to work with.

Kinda busy right now… here’s a couple of recent jobs:

Penthouse spot illustration for Dave Navarro column:

Click for a closer look…

Workplace poster illustration- pencils, inks and final:

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

Click for a closer look…

It’s half universal truth and half industry punchline that veteran artists often lament that “they just don’t make art supplies like they used to”. Younger artists usually roll their eyes, but just wait about 1o years, whippersnapper. When some art supply or tool that you have been using for a long time suddenly becomes discontinued or the manufacturing process with it changes so it doesn’t perform as you have been used to, it can drive you crazy. Creating is a personal process and there is nothing more frustrating than when something you previously relied on to do this suddenly refused to do it and instead does that. It derails the entire creative flow when you are forced to struggle with some mechanical hurdle.

Pen nibs are a great example. There is a famous story in the cartooning industry about Charles Schulz, creator of “Peanuts”, and his favorite pen nib. I’ve found sources that say this was the Speedball C-5, and while he might have used the C-5 at one time or another for lettering I have it from some a few who knew Sparky personally the nib in question was the Esterbrook Radio #914. This was the nib he exclusively used for inking Peanuts, and when he heard in 1971 that Esterbrook was going out of business he called them directly and bought every last box they had in stock. He claimed he’d retire when he ran out of that nib, rather than try using another. Another pen nib story comes from my good friend, mentor, longtime MAD artist and current MAD art director Sam Viviano. Sam was partial to the Gillott 303, but at some point Gillott changed the nib from a bronze finish to a blue steel finish, and Sam found it made the nibs far less reliable. He went around to art stores and bought up all the old stock 303s he could find, and he saves these for use when he is inking something that needs special attention. There are many similar stories. Suffice it to say when an artist finds a tool that works great for them, they become very unhappy if that tool goes away.

Which brings me to a personal gripe about the spiraling quality of previously reliable art supplies… namely the venerable Strathmore bristol board.

I used to exclusively use Strathmore 500 series Bristol board, 3 or 4 ply weight in a kid (cold press or textured) finish. I found these boards to be nearly bulletproof… they took all the penciling, erasing at inking you could throw at them and still the surface would take subtle washes if you wanted to add them after all that abuse. Great stuff, or used to be.

Lately I’ve gotten a number of bad batches of Strathmore bristol. The problem with them was they bled. Inking on them with a dip pen resulted in your line getting fuzzy and hairy-looking. Totally unusable. At first MAD sent me some boards that did that, and I couldn’t use them. I wrote it off as an anomaly… maybe somebody at the Strathmore plant spilled their Pepsi into the bleaching vat during that batch or something. Then I ordered a pack of 25 sheets of 4 ply 500 boards from an online art supply house, and all 25 boards did the same thing. Bled all over the place. I managed to use these boards anyway by spraying them with a photo-retouch fixative that is used to spray photographs so that someone can add painted tints and colors to them directly on the photo’s surface. This was an expensive solution, not to mention that aerosol can of fixative was so toxic I had to spray it outside while holding my breath and then run away. I am sure there is a hole in the ozone layer directly above my house.

Just the other day I got a pack of 25 sheets of 500 series from Dick Blick. Fortunately before I spent a lot of time penciling on one of the new boards, I tested it with the ink. It bled like a stuck pig. That’s three batches from three different sources in about 18 months that was bad. That’s not an anomaly, that’s a trend.

It’s frustrating because that stuff isn’t cheap. I paid over $140 for those twenty five sheets including shipping. Returning them will be no fun, but worse is how do I order them with confidence again? I can’t. There are few places in the Twin Cities that stock this kind of board where I can go and buy a sheet and test it first before buying up any stock. Frustrating. I’ve found this applies only to the 500 boards, and the lesser quality 400 boards are still usable (so far).

My apologies for the rant. I could go into how they don’t make movies/TV/music/donuts/etc. like they used to anymore, but I have to go outside and tell some kids to get the hell out of my yard.

Kind of on the quiet side for a change…

• Illustration for Sports Illustrated for Kids- A two page feature with assorted athlete caricatures. SI for Kids is one of the publications I’ve always wanted to do work for, so this is exciting.
• 100 plus new caricatures for the “Bobble Rep” app- The updated app with the 112th congress should be available sometime in Feb… unless Apple bans it of course.
• Marlin Workplace poster- My usual monthly assignment
• Jeff Dunham Project- I have some final art to wrap up on this

That’s pretty much it, other than some overdue personal work for a few people. The good news is that the light workload has allowed me to (finally) finish the next “How to Draw Caricatures” tutorial on drawing mouths, which I will post on Thursday… so don’t forget to come back and check that out.

The MAD show on Cartoon Network is still in reruns but as I’ve done some work on a few new segments there will be new shows on soon. In the meantime, I see the CN website has a series of parody posters for the various shows/movies they’ve lampooned available for download, including a bunch based on my artwork:

You can find the full set of high resolution posters for download here.

Q: Finding clients and jobs seem to be the biggest challenge for freelancers. Of all your freelance marketing efforts, what seems to be the most effective for you these days, and has that changed over the years?

A: Things have definitely changed over the last decade when in comes to how clients are finding illustrators for jobs. Back in the late 1990′s, printed sourcebooks like the Directory of Illustration and Workbook were arguably still the primary place art directors went to find illustrators. These sourcebooks are big printed volumes with glossy pages of ads by individual illustrators and representatives of illustrators showcasing the styles of said illustrators. They were a convenient place for art directors to go to browse for a style and look that fit their particular project’s needs, and copies were mailed free to tens of thousands of illustration buyers by the sourcebook publishers. However, I think the printed sourcebook is fast being replaced by web based resources that allow for easier, faster and more specific search results.

I’ve never had a great deal of success with on-line illustration “sourcebooks”. I’ve advertised in the iSpot in the past, as well as a local Twin Cities on-line illustration resource and only gotten a smattering of jobs from them, many of the “looking for a cheap option” variety. Just in the last year I have seen a dramatic jump in the number of jobs that have come directly from these types of resources… jobs from good clients with solid budgets. In fact in the last month I’ve gotten three big projects from three different clients exclusively from my on-line portfolios.

I think two things are happening that are increasing the effectiveness of these online illustration resources:

• Art directors are finding that the constantly improving keyword search engines of these sites are making it easy to find the exact kind of style any project they are working on demands- The sheer size of the printed sourcebooks are staggering… I can only imagine how time consuming it must be for art directors to flip through these monsters trying to find that one style they are looking for. No question, online resources like The iSpot make this much easier. You can search for subject matter, styles, techniques… almost any manner of category and come up with a page of results in thumbnail form allowing quick comparisons and browsing to find the right looks instantly. That’s a lot more efficient than paging through telephone directory sized printed volumes. An art director looking for an illustrator to do a cartoony-style caricature of a politician for an article can search for “caricature, politics, humorous, cartoon, line and color” and get a number of “hits” for their quick perusal. That’s efficient.
• Online resources are now being populated by top professionals so an art director’s confidence in finding the right illustrator for the job is high- Up until the last few years a lot of the top pros were not to be found on web-based resources. The perception was that serious illustrators stuck with the traditional sourcebooks, which were more expensive to participate in and seemingly more selective (they were NOT the latter to be sure, but definitely were the former) and online sources were populated more by startups/younger talents and cheapskates. I’m not sure if that perception was ever fair or accurate, but I do know that in the past my participation in those online resources netted only calls from small clients with low budgets, and printed sourcebooks were the ones that got me calls from bigger magazines/more legitimate clients with larger budgets. Now you find the likes of Mark Fredrickson, C.F. Payne and other big names on places like The iSpot, and I think that is making art directors understand they are searching pools of top professionals with these online resources. The recent surge of more well known and higher budgeted jobs I’ve gotten demonstrates this to me.

Of course no marketing effort is effective unless you are presenting your work properly, and online resources need constant attention. Unlike printed sourcebooks, you can’t just turn in your page and wait for the phone to start ringing. You need to constantly upload new pieces to your online portfolio, refine your keywords and keep your presence active.

Not being stupid, traditional printed sourcebooks are getting in on the internet surge. The Directory of Illustration in particular has a strong online presence, and advertisers in the Directory are also on their website. It might now be long before the printed sourcebook is a thing of the past.

Right now I find that a combination of online, printed sourcebook and direct mailing efforts are still best, but the online resources are on the outside lane and moving up fast.

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 your questions and I’ll try and answer them here!

If you are lucky enough to live on the islands of Hawai’i, you will find a few of my illustrations in the newest issue of Honolulu magazine.

Each year they give out their version of the “Worst Things of the Year” called the Sour Poi Awards, and this year they had me illustrate that article with a full page illo and a few spots. Here’s some of that artwork:

Click for a closer look…