Q. You may have covered this already but when drawing clothes, do you look for real examples in perhaps magazines to see how a material would crease in certain positions. Or do you just imagine in your head how it would look? So basically my question is, Tom, how do you draw clothing so well!?

A: I’m not sure I would agree that I draw clothes all that well, but thanks for the kind words. I do think I have improved quite a bit in the last few years on how I draw clothes, particularly simplifying the folds and such so they don’t look overwrought and too “wrinkly”. I was guilty of that early on in my career, and have learned over the years that less-is-more, and that if the folds and wrinkles you draw describe what is going on well, you don’t need that many of them. To answer one of your specific questions, I mostly just imagine these things in my head when I draw them, as I do not have the time or need to get references for every position of every figure.

With regard to drawing clothes, I would first cite a piece of advice I received from longtime MAD artist and current art director Sam Viviano. Sam told me he often will sketch out a figure as if they were nude first, then draw the clothes over the figure. In this way he both avoided the tendency to miss the accurate drawing of the figure beneath because he would be so busy thinking about the dynamics of the clothing, and made sure the figure looked like they were really wearing the clothes rather than them being painted on (see most superhero comics). I do this sometimes, and it really does help when you are struggling with a figure.

Drawing clothes is like drawing anything, you need to make good observations and understand the basics of what you are drawing to do it convincingly. This is especially true in cartooning, where simplification demands an understanding not only how something works, but what the most important basics elements are. Things like seams, buttons, cuffs, collars… knowing how they basically work and developing a repertoire of how to draw them is essential. There are not that many different kinds of clothing… pants are pants with only superficial changes in look and design. Knowing how pants are generally constructed means you can draw any type of pants by just observing the details. Certain types of pants, like jeans, are almost universal in their sameness. Men’s suit jackets are almost all the same, and follow the same tendencies with movement. Ditto shirts, skirts, etc.

That said, when people ask about drawing clothes, mostly they are asking (as you have) about how to draw folds and wrinkles so they look convincing. That really isn’t all that complex when you think about it. Clothing tends to wrinkle, crease and fold the same way with the same actions, positions and movements, with only the type of cloth making a difference. A thicker and coarser cloth, like a wool sweater, will wrinkle and fold in a bigger and less complex manner than thinner cloth like silk, for example. The dynamics of the folds and wrinkles are the same, however. Learning the basics of how clothing wrinkles and folds will get you through 90% of all the drawings of clothing you do.

The more you have movement from a “neutral” position (i.e. the way clothes would hang from a hanger) the more wrinkles and folds are evident:

Understanding the dynamics of where cloth is pulled and where it gathers helps to figure out where the stresses and folds happen. Folds and creases always emanate from a stress point, usually a joint like the elbow, knee, shoulder, crotch, etc. In a bent elbow area, for example, the outer part of the elbow is “pulled”, and therefore stretched with little or no creases/wrinkles. However in the crook of the elbow, the cloth gathers and is compressed together, creating folds:

Even in a neutral position, the weight and clingy nature of clothes will cause some creases and folds:

There are lots of different kinds of folds that you see all the time. Here are a few to look for:

You are (usually) wearing the perfect reference for learning to draw folds… your own clothes. Take a look at how the cloth gathers across your chest, how your lower pants legs gather past the knee as they go down to the cuff at your ankles, what happens when you sit down with the folds at your knees and waist… observation and experimentation with drawing will build that repertoire of folds and how to draw them.

Finally, I’d recommend the following resources for learning how to draw clothes:

Drawing the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm- If you do not own this book, you are missing one of the essential learning tools for drawing of the past century. IMO it’s the best overall book on drawing the human figure ever published based on its simplicity, conciseness, ease of understanding and richness of content. There are many more comprehensive books on various specifics out there, but this one is a must have even if it is dated-looking. Short but brilliant chapter on drawing folds in clothes, especially useful on learning how men’s suits are drawn.

Dynamic Wrinkles and Drapery by Burne Hogarth- It is not often I recommend a Hogarth book, because I am no Hogarth fan. I think most of his books are overly complex, with impossible and convoluted figures in positions that defy physics, and ridiculously over-drawn and over-rendered illustrations. This one, however, is shorter and less pretentious than most, and breaks down the types of wrinkles into fairly easy-to-understand categories… just imagine his illustrations with about 1/10 of the wrinkles he overdraws on them and you will get the idea.

I’m sure there are others, but these are the two on my bookshelf.

Thanks to Rob Rollason 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!

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:

Q: I see whenever you mention working digitally, you cite “PhotoShop” as the software you use. Why PhotoShop? Painter seems to be more of an artist-orientated program with a lot more choices for emulating natural media. Why don’t you use Painter?

A: I have also heard that Painter, and least compared to previous versions of PhotoShop, was a much more artistically versatile program. I dabbled in it once and found there was a dizzying number of choices as to drawing and painting media, paper and canvas textures and ways to mimic natural media down to applying watercolor “wet” and then “drying” the watercolor whenever you wished before moving on. Amazing stuff… but for me it was overkill.

I taught myself how to color and paint in PhotoShop, and so that program is the easiest and fastest for me to accomplish what I want to accomplish. I don’t use many filters or tricks, but really just paint using the opacity and size control of a pressure sensitive pen and table (actually the Wacom Cintiq) to get the look I want. Probably there are a lot of easier ways to accomplish the same look, but it works for me. Therefore, I go by the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

No doubt if I had taught myself on Painter I’d be using Painter and not PhotoShop, but I didn’t. Painter offered too many choices and the learning curve was too steep compared to the relative simplicity of PhotoShop, so I went that route.

It looks to me that PhotoShop is closing the gap with respect to natural media emulation. I have CS5 but find myself still working in CS4 because some of the new features are a pain.

Thanks to Terry J. 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!

Q: This is a follow up question to last Sunday’s mailbag (about computer crashes). I fix Macs, and something I hear all the time from photographers is that the glass panel on the iMacs makes it tougher to accurately edit photos.  Do you have that problem as an illustrator? Am surprised to see you’ve gone with an iMac, so I’m wondering if the glare doesn’t bother you, or if you work in a dark room.

A: I don’t have that problem for two reasons. First, my studio lighting is of the halogen track lighting variety and the fixtures themselves are almost directly above my head. Therefore it is impossible to see a reflection from the lights themselves on the screen… one of the bigger culprits with the glassy surfaces of the new Macs, also, my screen is tucked beneath a 12 inch shelf that further shields it from direct lighting. Because of the way the studio is lit, I really don’t have any glare  or reflections on my screen. The second reason is I do all my actual artwork on the Wacom Cintiq 21ux, which has it’s own screen and that has a sort of half glassy, half matte surface that reduces glare and keeps the colors truer.

I actually like the glassy screens on the new Macs. I used to have one of those 30″ Apple Cinema Displays with the matte screen and the colors on the new iMacs are much sharper and more dynamic. Maybe that isn’t so good for color proofing work, but I go by the colors on my Cintiq and know what to expect in terms of color shift from experience anyway. Other stuff looks great on that iMac screen, like video or regular computer stuff.

I was a little nervous trading in my Mac Pro for an iMac… but not because of the screen glare issue you mentioned. I don’t like having a computer where I cannot open up the case and replace or add a hard drive, dvd drive, etc. I went with it because desktop computers have reached the point with processing and graphics power and memory, available RAM and such that the work I do not longer requires a high end graphics workstation. Computers like a Mac Pro are really only necessary for CAD/CAM work, heavy duty video editing and animation/3D rendering. This iMac is actually quite a bit more powerful than my 5 plus year old Mac Pro was, and was less expensive than even a low end new Mac Pro. Plus no cables everywhere and less space utilized. Winning!

Thanks to Mike Solin 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!

Q: Like yourself I prefer to ink and scan. I do use a digital pen for all the colouring, washes and so forth but for the fine detail of the lining I prefer the real thing. So, I notice not all of your artwork is black outlined, some of your work you colour the lining to match the area it is next to, so perhaps a brown for the lining around the skin, blue for jeans, gray for hair and so on. So my question is, do you alter the colour of the lines in Photoshop or do you use inks or paints on paper first and then scan it in?

A: A few years ago I began experimenting with a colored line style of illustration that was essentially my MAD line and color style but with… wait for it… colored lines. It didn’t change my approach at all but made the final results more painterly looking and softer, which many art directors like better than the more cartoon looking black line.

Here’s an example:

Click for a closer look…

I ink the illustration as usual with black ink, then color the lines in PhotoShop. It’s easy to do. First follow these instructions to create the linework on it’s own otherwise transparent layer:

1. Scan line art as grayscale image
2. Create a new blank layer, rename it “Inks”
3. Go to the “Channels” palette, there is only one channel called “Gray”
4. At the bottom of the channels palette, click the “dashed circle” icon entitled “Load Channel as Selection”
5. In “Select” drop down menu, select “Inverse”
6. Go to your “Inks” layer
7. Press “D” on your keyboard to reset swathes so full black in active color
8. Press “Option” + “”Delete” to fill selection with black
9. On background layer, press “Command” + “A” to select and then “Delete” to delete line art on that layer
10. Convert to RGB or CMYK

With the line layer as the active layer, go to the layer’s palette. Above the list of layers, there is the word “Lock:” followed by several icons. Click the first icon, the box with the checkered pattern. This locks the transparent areas of the layer. After that, color will only “stick” to the lines, allowing you to paint them any color with the brush tool and maintain the line integrity.

Thanks to Scott Evans 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!

Too busy to do much of a post today. Instead, here is another of the spot illustrations done for Penthouse‘s new column by Dave Navarro…

Finished art- click for a closer look…

The rough pencil sketch

The printed illustration should be in this month’s issue of the magazine.

Q: Do you find architecture grueling to draw? Is there any trick to it or do you really have to draw each and every stinking brick and tile?

A: Drawing buildings and architecture can be very tiresome, but you have to know when it’s appropriate to draw every brick and tile and when you are better off “suggesting” the features of something like a building. Every illustration has a focus, and adding too much detail to an element that is only a supporting player in an image will distract from the focus and make the illustration too busy. If a building facade is close to the focal point of the illustration, I will add a fair amount of detail, but if it’s a background element, then I will just suggest detail.

The human eye and the brain are limited as to the level of detail they register because of two factors: the physical limits of the eyes themselves and the narrow focus the brain applies to the eyes as they look at a single object.

When I teach artists to draw live caricatures, I talk a lot about “distance specific” drawing with respect to detail. Intellectually we know that skin has pores and imperfections in it, that eyelashes are made up of tiny little individual hairs and the iris’s of the eyes are filled with cilia, the fibrous membranes that radiate out from the pupil to the edges of the iris and give the eye it’s color. From a typical distance that two people might stand speaking to each other, those details are not really seen because the eye cannot see that minutia from anywhere but extremely close up. From a comfortable distance, the skin appears somewhat textured but basically pore-less. The eyelashes are indistinct clumps of dark values without visible individual hairs. The iris becomes a gradation of color and the cilia are not visible. Despite this, many artists insists on drawing those pores, individual eyelash hairs and the cilia in the eye. This creates an odd look that detracts from the natural look of the face. Similarly when you draw a building in the background, you might know it’s facade is a brick pattern, but your eye only sees a vague suggestion of the pattern. Other details melt into the overall when the observer is removed from them by distance. Drawing these details like you were close up destroys the illusion of depth and distance in the illustration.

The brain can really only focus on a small area of the eye’s entire field of vision, and things like movement can enhance that effect. Say you watch a person walking along a wall littered with posters. Look away… do you remember what any of those posters depicted? No, because even though they were right in front of you your focus was on the person. Likewise the focus of your illustration needs the greatest amount of detail while the rest of the image the detail should be downplayed to draw the eye more to what is important. Generally I add detail to the elements of an illustration that is within the same plane of focus of the main elements of the image, and as you go away from that main element the detail begins to dissolve.

Getting back to the original question- buildings. The really important thing about buildings and architecture is not so much the surface details but drawing a convincing structure in the first place. Buildings aren’t just boxes with a roof… they have a lot of interesting planes and structural nuances that need to be drawn or suggested to make them successful. Things like soffits and fascias on the eves of a roof, mouldings around windows and doors, multiple layers of the sides of a skyscraper… these elements are visible even at a quick glance although we tend not to dwell or notice them. We’d notice if they were MISSING, however. Especially important is to add or suggest things that are part of the contour/silhouette of a building. Buildings would look spartan and block-like without the simple structural basics that make them look “real”. Buildings have personalities… no one would look at a 1980′s steel and glass office tower and mistake it for an early 1900′s New York commercial structure, even though they might have the same function.

Tricks to suggesting detail without drawing it all are doing partial patterns of bricks or windows, using color or values to indicate planes or shadows without drawing every edge and not continuing lines for elements like roof lines or mouldings but allowing the lines to fade as they get into the inner part of the building.

I have a fair amount of reference of different kinds of buildings, and sometimes pull them out if I want to make sure I give a building the right look to match the type of environment I am illustrating. Here are some examples of some different treatments for buildings:

Suburban street scene- I did some higher detail on the corner of the house in the foreground and “suggested” the siding and shingles on the house in the background. Note the addition of the roof vents and pipes as well as the multiple-level roof line… it’s those kinds of additions that, while simple, give the building a solid and convincing presence.

This New Orleans scene obviously needed some specific architecture to pull off. The balconies, wrought iron railings and curved eves are typical of New Orleans’ buildings. Note I did NOT draw the brick facades but only suggested them in the building peeking up above the main one, and the modern skyscraper in the far background is very much abstracted with only a suggestion of a pattern of windows. My using a gray/purple color further distances that background element.

This is a Times Square-like scene. Note the father you go back the less distinct and detailed the buildings get. Color and especially a gradual reduction in value contrast adds “atmospheric perspective”. Lots of suggestion of brick patterns here using color.

Scene looking down on city rooftops. The details like the arched upper floor windows, inset floors, vertical facade columns and rooftop elements like vents, pipes and mechanical units add an air of authenticity to the scene, even though the scale of the figures don’t match.

This Chicago skyline is abstracted and obviously bent for the sake of design. It uses recognizable Chicago buildings and again the structural individuality of each is suggested in the basic drawings without going crazy rendering every window or detail.

Thanks to Dave 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!

As an illustrator, and especially one who does a lot of caricature work, I often spend a lot of time preparing reference for a given project. I’ve written before about how the internet and image searches like Google image have revolutionized that process in recent years. In the “old days”, illustrators had gigantic “morgue files” stuffed with clipped pictures of people, places and things where they went to find reference for some given subject they needed to draw. I used to have two file cabinets full of celebrity pictures clipped from entertainment magazines that I’d pull out when I needed to do caricatures of somebody. I threw all those files out years ago in favor of internet image searches and DVD image captures. MAD used to send me page after page of printed references for parodies I was assigned. They stopped doing that years ago as well, partly because their art department staff keeps getting smaller and smaller but also because it was just as easy for me to do it myself.

While that is certainly a lot easier than keeping a morgue file, there was still a lot of busy work involved. First, I had to wade through page after page of search results looking for different angles that would given me a nice mix of a subjects face, and if I got lucky some different expressions as well. Image capture from DVD or downloaded video was a problem for me being on a Mac, because Steve Jobs and his Apple gestapo have seen fit to prevent a Mac user from making simple screen captures from commercial DVDs or downloaded video for “copyright protection”, even though my purposes for making these screen captures are 100% legal under “fair use” exceptions to copyright. I had to work around this using a program like VLC to do screen captures, which is clumsy and far from ideal… and that doesn’t help for video I get through iTunes. Finally, I was still a slave to printing out physical references on my studio printer because it is too awkward to put a computer monitor next to my drawing board and use a mouse to bring up whatever picture I need to look at out of a hard to navigate folder full of different images, then look back and forth as I try to draw. So, I would download a bunch of pictures and open, resize and place them in a PhotoShop page, and then print them out. Here’s an example I printed out for the parody of “30 Rock” I did a few years ago:

Well, technology marches on. Thanks to advances in hardware and software, last week I went 100% digital on my illustration reference for a big MAD TV parody I am working on… no printing, easy captures from any video source and a convenient and easy to navigate collection of photos simple to organize and access right next to my drawing board like a printed reference. It worked great and I can’t imagine going back to the hours I spent creating reference pages like the one above.

Here are the elements that have enabled me to make this happen:

Capture It!- I found this little shareware program recently after doing a search to see if someone had finally created a capture program that worked around the stupid and pointless Apple rules about capturing video on a Mac. You can capture any window or selection on your screen, INCLUDING video windows from DVDs or iTunes video, and automatically saves them in the format of your choice to the folder of your choice. Whatever you are not capturing is darkened on the screen and active areas follow your cursor around the screen without interfering with whatever you are doing, and doing a capture is as easy as a keyboard shortcut. The program also captures screen movements as video, which would be great for doing computer tutorials… of course many other programs do that. However this is by far the best and easiest for doing video screen caps. Highly recommended.

Apple iPad- Combined with iPhoto, the iPad makes an ideal way to organize and view your references. I collect all my references, be they screen captures or internet search images, into folders split up into one for each character and things like environments, objects, etc. A simple drag and drop onto my iPhoto icon places those references into iPhoto and each folder becomes a separate “Event”, keeping them organized. Then a sync of my iPad transfers them to that device.

Organization and access to the references couldn’t be easier or faster. No more endless digging around the piles surrounding my drawing board for the one page of reference I can never seem to find when I need it. A simple touch of any “event/folder” brings up a screen of thumbnails that allows me to easily scan my reference collection for whatever picture I want, then a quick touch brings up that image. I can use the “pinch” and “spread” movements to zoom in or out as desired, and swiping across scans to the next or previous image instantly. Touching the back arrow goes back to the thumbnails or back to the list of folders again to find other images. Best of all with the iPad, it literally sits next to my drawing board like a piece of printed reference so it’s easy to draw from.

I’ve got to say, this was a breath of fresh air for me on this latest job, which is packed with different characters and lots of environments that demands a lot of specific reference to get right. Not only did it save maybe as much as a day of copying, pasting, resizing, organizing and printing, I saved a lot of paper and ink not printing out a bunch of pages I’m just going to throw out when the job is done.

I also discovered that Apple either forgot to place the same restrictions on it’s iPad or realizes the policy of preventing screen captures of video is dumb, because you can do screen captures from any video directly on the iPad by pausing the image, then pressing the “Home” and “Power” buttons at the same time for a second or so. You hear a “click” like a camera and the entire screen is saved to your iPad’s iPhoto program, even iTunes video stills. Using a simple image editor allows you to rotate the picture or crop it if you need to. Unfortunately there is no way to move these pictures into new or existing folders within iPhoto, but they will reside in your iPad’s photo folder, so they are still easy to access.

Finally, the images themselves are fantastically clear and bright… no muddy printing to get in the way.

The only drawbacks are that I can only view one picture at a time… which I have to admit I do miss as it makes doing caricatures of a given subject a little easier when you have to do multiple caricatures of the same person and do not rely on a separate reference for each unique caricature. The other drawback is that my iPad’s power charge will eventually run out after a lot of hours of using the screen and browsing pictures. We are talking many, many hours though, and hooking it up to a charger when I take a break usually keeps it charged up enough to keep me going. At worst I can plug it in while I am using it, although the cable limits your moving it about somewhat.

After so many years of having reference pictures or printed pages littered about me in piles, it’s odd to have such a concentrated source of reference and such an uncluttered work area. I loved it though, and won’t be going back. 21st century indeed!

I received a note from an interested party yesterday concerning The Great MAD Art Sale (which officially ends on Monday, BTW… don’t delay, order now!) asking about original MAD cover artwork. He was looking to buy an original MAD cover, and wanted to know if I had any or if Mark Fredrickson has any originals available for sale?

My answers were: No, unfortunately I’ve never done a cover for MAD (well, two for MAD Kids and one for a MAD advertising insert… but they hardly count) and have no originals of cover art and, regarding Mark’s covers, I don’t believe any originals exist because he works 100% digitally these days. Fairness in conversation: I did the covers I just mentioned digitally as well.

Back in 2008 the last (an best) of the original cover art owned by MAD (or, more accurately the parent company of MAD: Time Warner) was sold at auction. Among them were 13 original covers done by the likes of Norman Mingo and Kelly Freas (and one chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs), that were considered the “Soul of MAD” i.e covers that represented what MAD was all about. They sold for a combined $750,000.

Legendary movie poster artist Drew Struzan recently retired from doing movie posters. He worked in acrylic and mixed media doing original paintings for some of the most icon movies posters in film history. His originals routinely sell for $90,000-$150,000.

Despite that market, the days of seeing that kind of original art available for sale is rapidly coming to a close. The reason? Computers. Digital artwork is taking over the commercial art field and more and more work is being done on the computer leaving no originals to be bought, framed and admired on a wall somewhere.

Take MAD covers, for example. Mark took over as the principal MAD cover artist arguably in 2003, when 5 of the last 6 issues of the year had covers illustrated by him. Except for a handful of special covers that were cartoon characters, graphics, dual covers or by the VERY rare different artist, Mark has done every MAD cover since 2005. Mark long ago put away his airbrush and went 100% digital,so as far as I know there are no originals of any of his MAD covers. Maybe he has pencil sketches or a tight pencil drawing or something that is “original” in the sense that it was part of the process of creating the cover, but there is no piece of physical artwork that corresponds with the finished cover image with Mark.

That seems pretty sad. However it’s really a kind of return to the old days and old ways. Back in the early-mid 1900′s when magazines and periodicals ruled the world of entertainment content and advertising, commercial artwork was hardly considered “art”. Magazine covers and art for publications and ads were done with materials that gave no thought to archival quality or anything other than looking good long enough to get reproduced and then it was trash. Nobody thought of this stuff as having any secondary value. MAD publisher Bill Gaines saved every piece of art ever done for MAD as he owned it all (based on the work for hire agreement all MAD artists and writers worked under), but I doubt he had any idea that the cover art of MAD #30 would one day sell for $250,000. Commercial art was a means to an end, and once the end was achieved then that art was done being of value.

It wasn’t until the nostalgia factor took over that original commercial artwork became valuable in a secondary market. Highly visible stuff like magazine cover art, art for iconic ads and products and other commercial illustration started being collected by a new generation of adults that were weaned on things like comic books and publications and who connected with those images on a personal level and… and here’s the important thing… grew up to have both money and the attitude that they would rather hang the original artwork of a cover of Spider-Man on their wall than some modern art minimalist painting. Suddenly all that trash art from yesteryear became treasures to the pop-culture saavy new professionals of the day looking to decorate their dens. A lot of that artwork was destroyed or done with materials that plain old faded away (Dr. Martin Dyes, a popular medium of color for commercial art in the 60′s, were especially infamous for losing their color and intensity is short order) so there was also a scarcity in available originals. Even the market for original comic book art, which often was saved if only for reasons of possible future reproduction, didn’t become a real market until the kids of the 50′s and 60′s became the adults of the late 70′s and 80′s with money to spend.

The point is that the illustrators of decades ago didn’t give much of a thought about the art they did past it’s reproduction. Today’s digital artist has the same sort of mentality… an original is far less important that producing the work in a faster and more efficient manner that makes for the transition from concept to printed piece as quick and seamless as possible. So you see, it’s all a return to the past.

The sad part of that equation is all the walls bereft of original illustration art in the future.

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.