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.

Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune has a special pull-out section entitled “2009 Vikings Season Preview” that features two full page illustrations I did of Brett Favre and company. One is on the front of the section and one on the back, each is meant as a “cover” but obviously with different possible messages.

The job was to illustrate two extreme scenarios of the outcome of the “Brett Favre” experiment at quarterback. They wanted not only to convey Favre as a savior in one and as a failure in the other, but also to show how you can flip the section over to see the opposite possibility.

Here’s some of the stages of the project:

Pencil Roughs

This project didn’t need any thumbnails or multiple conceptual drawings as it was pretty well described. The above rough sketches were to establish the basic layout and composition, gags, etc. The only client comments were they wanted to make running back Adrian Peterson more involved.

Final Pencils

Tighter pencil drawings on the final board with art direction incorporated. The text is added via PhotoShop.

Inks

Final Art

I considered doing my colored line technique on this but elected to go with the line and color instead as newsprint tends to make things murky and the hard lines would keep the illustrations sharper.

Back in the days before the internet, on-line selling, blogs and cheap foreign book printing the world of publication was a lot simpler. The creators (writer, artist, musician, cartoonist, etc.) submitted their work to a publisher. The publisher decided if it was worthy of publication, then did the editing, promotion, printing, distribution and collection of the money. The creator got their royalties (often after an advance on the royalties first) and the publisher kept the rest. The publisher was the middleman with a hammer… they wielded the power to decide what got published, how it was edited and how it was promoted. “Vanity Press”, or the self publishing of one’s own work, was the disreputable, red-headed stepchild of the publishing world… what one resorted to when no “real” publisher would accept their work.

The internet is changing all that, with the simple ability to put the creators in direct contact with the consumer in three fundamental ways: promotion, sales and publication/delivery of their work. This story from The Globe and Mail speaks specifically about how the internet and eBooks are changing the face of the traditional publishing model, but the same revolution is happening in every area of creative work. Today an artist can do their work, promote it, market it, publish it and sell it all from their kitchen table and cut the traditional publisher completely out of the picture. Self publishing one’s work no longer carries the stigma of being the last resort of substandard work. Creators are realizing that they do not need the overhead or approval of a publisher to sell their work to the masses. Inexpensive but high quality printing of books and magazines can be done through overseas printers and via electronic files, or the work can be published directly on the web and “monetized” through the sales of merchandise and printed collections as well as on-line advertising. The only real obstacle in the way of a full disengagement from the traditional publishing model is the inclusion of such works in brick and mortar stores (bookstores, Wal-Mart, etc)… which are increasingly becoming less and less the dominant place to buy books, music, etc.

The usual gripes by old school creators apply: “Anybody can publish a book now. Being published isn’t a sign of success or quality. There is no quality control.” To a certain extent this is true. Nearly every kind of creative work that once was only presented to the world through agents like publishers, syndicates, record labels and movie studios/networks can now be self published. Anyone with a little money, a desktop computer and some time to do the research can publish their work in a form basically indistinguishable from big-name publishing. Unlike just a few years ago, self publishing is  more a choice than it is a necessity for creators. Choosing to go the self publishing route no longer means one’s work isn’t just as publication ready as the stuff put out by established publishing houses. Some really great work is being self published these days… and in a format that is just as professionally done as any released by well known publishing houses.

The thinking behind publishing itself has to change. The old idea that just to have a book/comic/record etc. in print means the creator who’s name is on it does great work is no longer valid. Instead it’s the marketplace that will decide whether the content offered is worthwhile or not. The power to make the decision as to what is worth spending money on is being taken out of the hands of a third party agent/publisher and put directly into the hands of those who consume the work, i.e. the buying public. It’s possible for small press publishers to make a reasonable living publishing their own work in books, DVDs, etc. without their publications ever seeing the inside of  Barnes and Noble, Wal-Mart, Border’s, etc. In fact where creators needed to sell large numbers of their published works under the old publishing model in order to realize enough money in royalties to make a decent profit from their efforts, self published and self marketed work need only sell a fraction of those amounts to realize the same kinds of profits. You don’t need to sell 100,000 books to eek out a living when you aren’t giving most of the profit to a publishing house.

This week will be the comic art industry’s biggest showcase of this publishing revolution: the San Diego Comic Con. Ten years ago the “Artist’s Alley” spaces at Comic-Con was full of mainstream artists selling original comic art and doing sketches and “small press” comics creators selling cheap ashcan printed underground comics. These days both Artist’s Alley and many of the main floor’s spaces are filled with creators selling beautiful hardcovers or slick perfect bound books full of their work, sketches, illustrations and cartooning, how-to DVDs or high quality comics and graphic novels that are essentially “self published” work…. if that term even really applies anymore. In many cases the creators have no major credits outside of their own books and publications. That is no longer an indication of the quality of the work offered. As this type of publication model becomes more and more prevalent the competition for consumer dollars will become more fierce and the marketplace will decide what becomes successful and what does not.

It really is becoming a different world in the publication industry. It’s certainly exciting for both the consumer and the creator. The former will have access to an unprecedented variety of creative works, while the latter will be afforded the opportunity to get their work out in front of the public when previously they had to hope some third party deemed their work worthy of such a release. That’s ultimately going to be a great thing for the culture of art and creativity.

It seems like every time I open the newspaper, there is more bad news about the economy. Apparently we are in a recession… The beauty of it is that the “experts” figure it started about December of 2007. I’m still not entirely clear on how we can be in a recession and not realize it for an entire year, but that’s how these things work.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the economy is in rough shape. The real indicator, to me at least, of that is the unemployment rate. At over 8%, it’s pretty bad. Since our economy is essentially built on the buying and consumption of goods, less people with jobs means less people buying stuff meaning less stuff being made meaning less jobs for people who make the stuff. A vicious cycle.

So, what does that mean for freelancers? We can’t be fired, so we can’t lose our jobs, right? We can lose WORK, however, and with dwindling budgets many clients have cut back on buying illustration in order to save money. The publication business was in trouble long before our economy started to spiral, that’s a double whammy for those who depend on magazine or newspaper work for a lot of their jobs.

So what’s a freelancer to do? There are a few things that you can do to help bring in jobs during these tough times:

1. Step up your Marketing- It is a natural reaction to cut back on expenses like advertising to try and save money when things get tight, but that is the opposite of what you should be doing. One thing that is absolutely guaranteed to happen if you cut back on your marketing budget: you will get less work. There are two reasons to not just continue but to increase your marketing if you can: First, more marketing might or might not lead to more work, but less will DEFINITELY decrease your visibility to potential clients and will lead to less work at a time you can least afford to have that happen. Secondly, many of your competitors will foolishly choose to cut back on their marketing, leaving you with a wider window to get work they might have been called for had their work been marketed properly. Their mistake can be your gain.

2. Smarter Marketing- The previous point doesn’t mean you should start spending money on ineffective marketing. If you haven’t had past success with a given marketing effort like a source book ad or an online portfolio service, it is not likely that venue will suddenly prove effective now. Concentrate on direct, personal marketing with postcard or mini-poster mailings directed straight to the art buyers of your target clients. Time spent researching and preparing mailings and personal notes is only a waste if you are putting off actual jobs to do it… and if you are honestly too busy to do that research and effort then you don’t have a problem in the first place, do you? A few evenings spent compiling a list of current publication art directors, their addresses and hand addressing current work mailings can pay off big later. Trying other avenues is risky but might also pay off.

3. Cultivate Past Relationships- You already have one excellent source of proven potential clients… your freelance records. Go back through your last few years of invoices put together mailings to those clients you’ve done work for in the past and reconnect with them. Show them what you are up to and remind them you’d love to work with them again if something comes along they think you are right for. You may find some art directors have moved on… often you can get their current contact info and reconnect with them at their new publication (if any). Out of sight is out of mind, and a reminder of your past work with a client will often lead to them remembering your work when something comes up that you might work well on. Past clients should be on a permanent mailing list anyway, but if you’ve been remiss on this then now’s the time to reconnect.

4. Seek New Opportunities- Have you been relying on a few key clients or work from a certain section of the industry for most of your jobs? It’s easy to get comfortable with too many eggs in one basket. Now might be the time to explorer other places your work would be of value. Product packaging, website graphics, character design and/or branding, advertising… there are lots of venues out there needing good quality illustration work. Spend some time thinking about other possible avenues your work might apply to. Maybe some of your marketing budget can go to advertising your skills to an entire new potential client industry.

5. Stay Positive- Things will turn around and get better. Good things happen to good people, even if it takes time. Treat your clients with professionalism, respect and appreciation, and they will reciprocate.

Here’s wishing health and happiness to all for 2009.

I did this little doodle as an experiment with a new technique I am working on. It involves using colored lines as opposed to traditional black inked lines for a digitally colored piece. It’s hardly a new concept, but I have only attempted it a few times and in different ways with mixed results. The above was done by inking the drawing in the traditonal way and then scanning as always, but then replacing the black ink color with other colors. It produces a slightly more painted and softer look.

This short tutorial is a just a small taste of a larger and much more in-depth book I wrote called The Mad Art of Caricature! The book is 175 full-color pages, lavishly illustrated and contains greatly expanded explanations of the concepts presented in this tutorials, as well and a great deal of additional material on caricaturing other facial features, posture, hands, expression and more, techniques on drawing from live models, doing caricature for freeplace illustration and for MAD Magazine. This is a must have book for anyone interested in caricature, cartooning or humorous illustration. You can order it online here.

How to Draw Hands

Easily the most asked question I get is “how do you draw caricatures?”. However a close runner up is “how do you draw hands?”.  I’m not exactly the king of drawing hands, but I have made a special study of them as they are very important when doing comic book type work… hands and their gestures are a big part of “acting” and therefore of storytelling.

Next to faces, hands are probably the most expressive and intricate part of the human form. In fact, humans probably spend more time looking at their hands than they do looking at anything else over their entire lives. Being that we are all so familiar with the way hands look, a poorly drawn hand sticks out like a sore thumb (sorry about the pun). Oddly enough, hands are something that most artists struggle to draw well. So, with that in mind I thought I’d do a tutorial on my approach to drawing hands.

I’m a cartoonist at heart, so the hands I draw are not realistic hands by most definitions. However my style of cartooning lends itself more to realistic representation than, say, a certain four fingered gloved mouse or other much more cartoony characters do. Therefore a lot of the information in this tutorial will apply to drawing hands realistically as well as in more cartoon form. I’ll attempt to explain the basic anatomy of a hand, things to keep in mind at all times when drawing them and common mistakes and issues that plague many artists when drawing hands.

Breaking Down Hand Structure

As with drawing anything, it all starts with an understanding of the basic form and structure of your subject matter. Hands are certainly no different. In fact, many of the most common problems with drawing hands stems from incorrect notions of the form of the hand. I’m not a big stickler for memorizing the names of muscles and bones because it seems to zone people out when you start tossing around “Carpal this” and “Metatarsal that”… however labels are something that some people need to be able to apply, so some general surface anatomy with layman’s terms seems to be the best approach. Here is a breakdown of a hand with the important surface elements labeled:

Not really much to it, is there? Everybody knows what knuckles and fingernails are. Where an artist gets tripped up is not understanding how they relate to one another, and how they move in relationship to one another when the hand starts doing it’s thing. Things like how the knuckles line up, where the pad creases fall, how the fingers bend and interact… these are all important elements to drawing convincing hand gestures. (more…)