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!

Jeff Dunham’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist character

I’ve been alluding often here on The MAD Blog for the last year about artwork I am doing for über-popular comedian/ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, but have never been more specific. That’s because, as usually goes along when doing anything for folks in show business, there are confidentiality agreements galore involved. Some of that work is going to start appearing here and there, and Jeff has told me I can fill people in a little (operational word) on what’s all involved.

The image above is one of a series of illustrations I’ve done/am working on of his various characters, this one being Achmed the Dead Terrorist. That’s only part of this ongoing project. Other aspects have included multiple other, less complex art for use in various projects and items.

The most exciting thing I’ve been doing for him has been concept art for… well, I’ll have to let him tell you about that. An upcoming TV special on Jeff will spill the beans on that project. I’ll let everybody know when that is announced and when it will air. In the meantime, you can get an idea of what I might have been involved with on Jeff’s Comedy Central special, which you can either order the DVD of here or see re-aired on Comedy Central on Sunday, October 30 at 7 pm and 8:30 pm.

It’s been great fun working with Jeff and his agents. They’ve given me a great deal of latitude on working their stuff in around the edges of more pressing deadlines, allowed me space my own artistic input in the work, and Jeff himself is a great guy. In fact, he wrote a blurb for the back of my book!

More on this to come as I am able to share.

These just saw print in the latest issue of Cleveland Magazine for their “Best of Cleveland 2011 Awards” feature:

Best of Food: Luxury Sunday Buffet

Best of Entertainment: October “Dead Ride” zombie bike race

Best of Drink: The “Slap Shot”…

A fun little project. They wanted bold and colorful… Here are the pencil sketches:

There is a short piece in this month’s issue of SI Kids featuring a few spot illustrations I did. The article is about different types of coaches, and drew a cartoon character version of each “type” showing some of their pro and con attributes. We loosely based some of them on real coaches, but not in their facial features. Things like clothing, accessories and demeanor might remind you of certain real coaches in pro or college sports. None of them are even remotely caricatures of real people, though.  Here are the final results . . . I think the details of the type is pretty self-explanatory between the illustration and the name:

The General

The Geek

The Yeller

The Old Guy

The Kid

The Buddy

And here are the pencil roughs of each:

Summer draws to a close and the drawing board is heating up. Here’s what I have going right now:

• Cover Illustration for the UTNE Reader- Kind of like my last cover for them, only different!
• Spot Illustrations for Cleveland Magazine- Fun little job for the city publication
• Jeff Dunham work- More illustrations for Jeff. I’m told he will have a TV special soon that reveals some of the stuff I’ve been doing for him (even credits me for it!) and when that airs I will be able to finally show off some of the work I’ve been doing.
• CG Animated Character Designs- More work for RG Entertainment that I did stuff for on their films Super Capers and I Want Your Money. The animated segments from I Want Your Money caught the interest of a company that is producing a series of over 20 commercials using the same characters. So I am now doing more turnarounds including Ben Bernanke and Pat Boone. No idea when they will start airing, but I’ll let you know.
• MAD- Something supposedly coming this week for issue #512, unless they got blown away by Hurricane Irene.
• Personal commission- No kidding, this one has been overdue for six years. Embarrassing. However seeing as how I finally got my book done, which I had been trying to do for about 10 years, this one seems like I’m rushing it.

Here’s some work I did recently for the Marlin Co. Click either image for a closer look:

Final illustration

Pencil rough

Q: Have you ever been asked to do a job that you weren’t comfortable with for philosophical or ethical reasons? How did you handle it?

A: Yes, I have had a few occasions where I have been approached to do some job that I was not comfortable doing. I handled it by politely turning it down.

What kind of jobs? Well, I am a pretty open-minded sort of guy, so there isn’t a whole lot of things that would bother me to the point of refusing to do work associated with it. There are shades of definition in everything, but in simplest terms I won’t do work that conclude the following:

• Pornography
• Promoting drug/alcohol use to kids
• Blatant and/or malicious racism, sexism or any other type of hate or discrimination directed at a person or group of people

A lot of what I feel falls into those categories is open to debate over definitions. Nudity is not pornography in my book, as long as it is done tastefully and is important to the context of the illustration and whatever story it is illustrating. I do work for Penthouse, and the first thing I told them when they called me was I would not do any real pornography, to which they said they would only consider me for work I was comfortable doing. Some of it has involved nudity, but I was allowed to present it in the way I wanted, and have been very happy with the work I have done for them over the years. I have not crossed my idea of “the line”, and they have not asked me to. I have been asked several times to do work for porno publications and websites, to which I have said a polite, “No thanks”.

As far as drugs and alcohol, I’d be reluctant to do any job that truly glorified the use of drugs in general, but if it is aimed at kids then that is out of the question. That includes cigarettes. I have done plenty of jobs that depicted drinking alcohol, usually in humorous ways, and some that treated drugs in the same way, but again that is not quite what I mean by “promoting drugs or alcohol”. Mostly it would come down to if I thought the article in question was promoting the use to kids, or presenting the use of really bad drugs as being acceptable at any age… I’m talking heroin, crack or the like.

As far as the discrimination thing goes, there is a difference between un-PC level humor and real, intentional hate speech. Those jobs must past the “sniff test”—if they smell bad they are bad, and I pass. Some people may disagree that something I thought was just an off-color or somewhat insensitive joke to be a horribly hateful, racist thing, but there are plenty of people in the world who are way too sensitive about that kind of thing, and everyone has their own ideas about that. If I feel what I am doing is not meant to be hateful, I am content with that decision.

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!

Click for a closer look…

I’ve been swamped all summer, but have put several projects behind me in the last few weeks including:

• Sports Illustrated Kids- 2 pager
• MAD animated show work- Season Two begins
• Jeff Dunham Illustration Work
• The above Marlin Co. Poster illustration

I have just a few jobs on the board right now:

• MAD- 6 page parody for #511
• Yet another Marlin poster
• More Jeff Dunham stuff
• THE BOOK

I am totally swamped right now, but here’s a recent small project I did that just saw print. This is a spot illustration that appears in the current issue of UTNE Reader (July-Aug 2011). It depicts viral internet rapper “Ms. Peachez” being looked upon with contempt and disbelief by Snoop Doggy-Dogg and Jay Z for her stereotyped, “Southern hip-hop” styling. BTW, Ms. Peachez is actually Mr. Nelson Boyd. It’s hard to tell if the Peachez videos are supposed to be parodies or celebrations of Southern culture. I’m going with the former, since the video the illustration is referencing “Fry that Chicken” is so over-the-top with racial and cultural stereotypes it reminds me of old 19th century black-face skits: