Click image for a closer look…

Yikes. How can my being gone from the studio for one week result in three weeks worth of work to catch up on??? And I even worked on a job the first few days I was in New Jersey for the Reubens… oh well. It’s a good problem to have these days, even if it means life is about to become very complicated. Sadly this means another cop out on the Sketch o’the Week. This week will have to be a rough of a recent job… this being one of those workplace poster illustrations. I’ll post the finishes sometime soon.

Not a whole lot on the board right now. That’s a good thing as I have to travel over the next two weeks opening up my theme park operations in Missouri and Massachusetts. I always have to turn down a few jobs at this time of year because of the theme park demands. I just wrapped up a series of storyboards for some animated segments in a movie as well as a few additional character designs for it, and another Marlin Co. poster illustration.

Here are the things I am currently working on:

• 2010 NCS Reubens T-Shirt Art- My annual illustration for the cartoonists weekend
• Two personal projects- Real painting!
• Movie Poster- For the film I did the animated characters and storyboards for

Here’s the art for the latest Marlin workplace poster. … Click each image for a closer look:

Pencil Roughs

Final inks

As you can see the client had a few changes. They wanted the firefighters on each side of the grill to be wearing hazmat suits as opposed to regular firefighting gear, and one to have a hose. They also wanted to lose two of the firefighters in the background.

The finished illustration…

Q: Norman Rockwell writes in his book Norman Rockwell, artist and illustrator )by Norman Rockwell & Thomas S. Buechner) how people would constantly write in to the Saturday Evening Post about the mistakes he made in his references. Do you get any of that kind of feedback? If so what is the biggest mistake you have made, if any?

A: I believe you are talking about “bloopers” like drawing six fingers on a hand or something similar, as opposed to mistakes in perspective or similar mechanical flaws… because if it’s the latter this will be a very long post.

Oh, I’ve made my share of dumb mistakes in some of my illustrations. In 99% of the cases it’s just being in too big a hurry and making quick changes without thinking things completely through. I’ve posted a few of them here in the past, and here are two of the ones that come to mind right away:

In the baseball scene above, I was supposed to draw two guys colliding in the outfield while the ball drops to the ground. In my haste to finish the piece I was thinking more about the interest of the colors than I was about the scene itself. The mistake? Two guys on the SAME TEAM would be wearing the SAME UNIFORM! D’oh! The client also did not catch it so it went to print as is.

In the scene above, I did a bunch of changes from the original sketch where I pasted in elements from one sketch to a second. During that process I switched the business woman’s legs around so her right knee was forward rather than her left as in the original sketch. The mistake? I didn’t change her left foot into a left foot, so she has TWO RIGHT FEET. D’oh! Client didn’t catch that one either, but one of my blog readers did, and the art got fixed in time for the printing!:

I’m sure there have been others but I’m not coming up with any right now from “professional” illustration work.

There have been a few doozies I’ve done when doing live caricature, though.

One of the drawings I often do with young teenage boys is the simple “showing off the bicep” pose where the kid holds up one arm to show a well defined but roughly walnut sized bicep muscle flexed. I drew one kid once in this pose who had come in and sat down while I was turned around giving change to my last customers. He was sitting in front of me when I turned about, and he was kind of short so I couldn’t see much past his neck due to the angle of my drawing board.  I did this pose on him, with his right arm flexed. His buddies behind me started laughing and told me to look closer. I rose up in my chair… the kid had NO RIGHT ARM. Missing from the deltoid down. Ooops.

Another time I was drawing a twelve year-old who had these lush, dark eyelashes, full red lips and thick, curly hair. The mom asked if I’d do a drawing with a tennis theme. I drew the subject in a cute tennis skirt delivering a backhand smash. I finished the drawing in color and handed it over, got paid and went on with the day. Later the mom came up and told me she just wanted to know how upset her SON was that I drew him in a skirt. Ooops. After that I would ask the kid’s name before committing to a specific sex in the drawing… of course whenever I was in doubt the name was always “Chris/Kris”, “Pat” or “Sean/Shaun”.

A few years ago at Valleyfair I was drawing a couple towards the end of a busy day, and I did one of the quickest and easiest of poses… the guy with his arm around the girl and giving the “thumbs up” as he looks at her. The couple and their friends watching were Hispanic and speaking Spanish so I had no idea what they were saying. As I got through drawing the bodies and started adding the color, the friends started laughing and saying all sorts of stuff to the guy. He starts laughing and then raises his hand up to show me… NO THUMB. Ooops.

That doesn’t even take into account the times I’ve mistakenly thought a dad and his adult daughter were a couple, that a woman was pregnant when she wasn’t (those are never pretty) or that what I thought were freckles were really zits.

Thanks to Micheal Garisek 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 have been looking for a platform on the Net to publish my works and, what is more important to me, get a little feedback on what I am doing. I have been considering Flickr, DeviantArt etc., but I am quite confused about the implications of the copyright terms behind them. I also have been thinking about opening an old-fashioned (but always good) blog, whereas building my own website from scratch still sounds premature to me. So I am asking your opinion: what do you think would be a good internet publishing platform for a wishful beginner?

A: As far as the copyrights associated with publishing on some social sites,  I have heard horror stories about relinquishing your copyrights when you post images on Flickr and Facebook, but for the most part I believe that they are not true. The last info I heard about Flickr was that images posted there automatically were marked as copyrighted (All Rights Reserved), which means they cannot be used without the permission of the copyright owner. You can change that manually into several different license arrangements.

There was a brew-ha-ha not so long ago when Facebook changed its terms of use that seemed to say their licenses on “user content” did not expire if the user deleted their account. That turned out to be much ado about nothing.

Many of these these of internet social sites use variations of the Creative Commons licenses agreements. In any case you own the copyrights to any images you create unless you specifically give permission for another party to use them. Of course that hardly prevents people from stealing and using them, but it is against current copyright law to do it.

Copyright issues aside, neither of these two social networks seem like good solutions for your needs: a place to post your work AND to receive feedback and (presumably) critiques.

DeviantART seems a better fit. It seems to be exactly as you describe you need: a place to post your artwork and get feedback from other DeviantArt members. Is is worthwhile? I don’t know as I’ve never used it. I would expect the key is getting your artwork in front of other people who do work in a similar way, either by subject matter, style or some other common denominator… if you do sci-fi fantasy art you’d want to belong to a sci-fi fantasy club or something like that. I don’t know how it works, if you get good feedback or if it’s a gigantic waste of time.

Starting a blog seems like a good thing to do. It’s free (unless you really want to go crazy and self host a custom one) and you can post your art on it as you see fit. The trouble is getting people to see it and have them give you good and honest feedback. Asking for critiques and advice on the internet is a tough thing to do. First you need to get people who’s opinion you would value to look at your work, then get them to spend the time and energy critiquing it. That’s asking a lot of people and their time. You might get some good feedback and you might not. I personally do not critique the work someone posts their artwork on their blog unless they are specifically asking for a critique from readers (and I can find the time, of course). Not everyone who posts art on a personal blog wants critiques… some just want to share it, so be sure you specifically request such when you do.

My suggestion is to search for forums and organizations dedicated to your type of art. Using the Sci-Fi Fantasy example, search out communities dedicated to that type of art, and then post your work there as well as advertise your blog and ask for critiques.

For caricatures, I would heartily recommend the International Society of Caricature Artists. They have a members-only forum where you can post work, ask for critiques and see other artist’s work and works in progress. There is sharing of techniques, advice, etc there. Searching for keywords in the forum archives alone is worth the membership fee of $50 for your first year ($60 thereafter) which also includes their quarterly magazine Exaggerated Features. That’s just one example of a community dedicated to a specific type of art. Another good one (that’s free) is The Drawing Board.org, which is an amalgamation of illustration, cartooning, animation, painting, comics and just plain old drawing. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I understand it’s still chugging along and there are lots of participants.

Thanks to Alessandro Munari 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 application of color. I’ve already seen your tutorials about coloring, but I’d like to know how to use the right color for each kind of illustration you make. How do you make your color selections? How do you know what’s the right color to use? Do you do it intuitively or is it pre-meditated?

A: I am definitely the wrong guy to ask this question. In my opinion my color use skills are not very good, and certainly not very thought out. What (very) little I know about color I picked up on my own and never studied any color theory or application anywhere.

People that know what they are doing with color understand that “pure” or “primary” color is bad. In real life, the colors we see are never pure colors, but are always influenced by the colors and light about them. A red ball sitting on a blue floor will have elements of each other on their surfaces because of the light that reflects off each and onto the other, and the shadows that are cast also cause color shifts. Color is caused by objects reflecting different wavelengths of light off their surfaces, and that light can get changed by the various objects it comes into contact with. Therefore an environment tends to have an overall color cast, where the colors are pushed towards a common color. “Monochromatic” is a term that means something that is all in shades of one color… I don’t mean that. I mean having all colors incorporate a hint of a single overall color that creates a cohesive feel.

Painters can create this effect in several ways, one of which is to simply incorporate the colors of surrounding objects into the colors of that which they surround. Another method is to use a “limited palette”, where they might have only two or three colors of pigment and force themselves to paint their image with only combination of those colors. MAD Magazine genius Harvey Kurtzman used a variation of an old painter’s trick called an “underpainting”, where he would paint the entire area he was coloring with a layer of color… say yellow… then would paint on top of that color. The end result was an image with an overall warm, yellow feel but not monochromatic. Not paying attention to this concept (which I rarely do) is called using “local” color… meaning the natural color of an object unmodified by the light, shadow or any other influence from around it. I use a lot of local color in my illustrations…. I like the bright look and it works well with my cartoony style.

Color has a lot of complexities to it, but I take a very simple approach. I think of color in terms of depth and perspective. The more saturated the color, the more it “comes forward” in the image, and the less saturated the father back it seems. Likewise with warm versus cool colors. Warm colors advance while cool colors recede. Here’s an example from last years “Who’s thinking What at the Obama Inauguration”. I added increasing levels of blue casting to the colors the farther back the crowd goes. The colors at the bottom of this image are more saturated and less blue than those at the top:

Those are really the only rules I keep in mind when doing color, otherwise I select colors based on the subject matter and environments I am coloring. Sometimes what you are coloring dictates the type of color you should use. For example, some years ago I did a parody of the film “Van Helsing” for MAD. If you are unfortunate enough to watch the movie (yeah, it’s that bad) you might notice that there is very little color in it. They went for a drab and gray color palette to match the sullen Transylvania countryside in winter. I therefore leached much of the color out of even the skin tones in my art to give it the same effect:

At other times I might punch up the color to be more garish than usual, if I am doing something that demands it, like my MAD parody of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”… lots of color in this show with their decorating makeovers and clothes:

Mostly, though, I just pick colors to make things pop out that I want to pop out and to make things recede that are less important. Simplistic, I know, but I’m no painter.

Well, I managed to type a lot of words about something I don’t know much about. I’d seek knowledge about use of color from books or resources on painting. Color theory applies to any medium.

Thanks to Angel Flores from Mexico City 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 image for a closer look…

The October issue of Penthouse should have the above spot illustration of mine in it somewhere. It’s just a silly little cartoon that is accompanies a short Halloween article about the scariest thing a college student still living at home can experience.

This job was one that somewhat approaches the line for me when considering work for a publication like Penthouse. I’ve done a few illustrations for them now and made it plain to the art director on the outset that I would not do any overtly pornographic images. I’m no prude and have zero problems with that type of illustration or with people who read magazines with those kinds of images in them, but I don’t want to do them myself. Partly because I just don’t want to do it, and partly because I work for several publications that are read by little kids, and it’s entirely possible the art directors who give me those jobs might have a problem with my byline under a cartoon of a graphically sexual nature. Plus it’s been my experience that when you walk down that road you tend to be forced to continue down that road because other roads are then closed to you… in other words it’s easy to get “typecast” as a “blue” cartoonist.

Penthouse is totally cool with that, and then have never asked me to do anything of that nature. They have plenty of artists who can do a better job of that than I anyway. This particular job certainly is a little on the racy side, but I felt the humor of it and the fact that I was allowed to be more suggestive than literal made it work for me. In fact it’s much funnier to have such a scene “off camera” and use the shadow on the wall to let the viewer know what the guy at the door is seeing than actually showing it would be. Your imagination comes into play, and that is almost always more effective that hitting someone over the head with an image.