I had a nice, long blog post ready for today about dealing with deadbeat clients, but I have limited internet access here in Atlanta and can’t upload the article. It will have to wait until Monday. Sorry about that, folks. The mailbag question for tomorrow is controversial, however… so maybe that will make up for it. READ MORE
Deadlines conquered. Now I am off to Atlanta, Georgia on a very sad errand. After nearly 19 years I am closing up my caricature concession stand at the downtown retail complex Underground Atlanta. I’ll blog about it next week, but it was the first business I ever opened and I am sorry to see it die. …gotta catch a plane. Sorry, no time for a real blog post today. READ MORE
Alfred E. Neuman is one of the most recognized pop culture icons in the world. Go figure, but it’s true. MAD didn’t invent him, he’s actually been around since the 1800’s, appearing in ads for children’s dentistry and other products. Maria Reidelbach‘s book “Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine” has a whole chapter on the origin of Alfred, but the bottom line is that nobody really knows for certain when the grinning gap-toothed idiot really first appeared in pop culture. As the story goes, original MAD editor Harvey Kurtzman had seen images of the “What- Me Worry? kid” from old ads… READ MORE
WIP sketch of recently deceased former talk show host Merv Griffin. This one was from a few months back, just after he passed away from a picture in one of the entertainment magazines. Obviously I never finished it so I never posted it here, but I thought it might be of interest to see an unfinished sketch or two every once and a while. You can see things like explorations of form and shape with the sketchier lines, and how the small suggestion of shadows and just the beginning of the rendering still produces a strong likeness if the initial drawing is strong. A good… READ MORE
I revised this image from last year, and here’s the same message: Don’t start 2008 on the wrong foot. As my grandma used to say, “It’s a brand new, shiny year, and it’s going to be better than ever!”… of course grandma was a few cards short of a full deck, but her heart was in the right place. Happy New Year! READ MORE
Still crazy busy with a deadline for MAD, so today I am just going to post this reminder again about my guest speaker appearance and inking workshop March 2-5th in St. Louis. Today is the last day you can register at a discounted rate for the St. Louis NCN Minicon. You can still register tomorrow and later, but it’ll be more dough and they do have limited capacity. This will be a lot of fun and full of opportunities to learn with all the seminars and workshops going on. I hope to see you there. READ MORE
Q: Do you have some set of rules that determine a particular way a caricature should be done depending on face shape or features or is it simply an acquired gut feeling? A: If by “rules” you mean following a template that is applied to any face that is drawn, then absolutely not. Following the same rules or pattern of exaggeration for all faces isn’t caricature, it’s stylization and distortion. If you apply the same relationship of features, for example, on each face you draw, you may get a likeness depending on your skill with the individual features but you would be missing the target… READ MORE
In case you haven’t seen it via Drawn! or the Wisenhiemer Cartoonists forum, here’s a link to Gizmodo’s review of the new 12″ portable Cintiq tablet/display from Wacom. It features a video with unpacking and the creating of a color image of “Bender” from “Futurama” along with subtitles commentary. The verdict from Gizmodo is “professional artists: GET IT!”. Another independent and even more in depth review can be found at my friend Cedric Hohnstadt’s blog. Cedric got the new Cintiq and has good things to say. Both these reviews are highly useful as they are done by working artists, as opposed to being reviewed by… READ MORE
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