Spooner

(click to enlarge)

Le crow.

Deep blacks can be tricky for me because they can overwhelm other pieces of the drawing, but I like how this one turned out.

Tree Three

A variation of the previous Tree drawing. Used the Transform function to change the angle and then redrew facial parts.

Spooner

For Illustrators

Some tips on Pricing

Business and legal forms for Illustrators

The Campaign for Illustration

Drawing Resources

Illustrating Children's Books

Verla Kay's Website for Children's Writers & Illustrators

The Six Million Dollar Man

Lee and Low Books Special Call for Illustrators

Teach Workshops for Children

Get represented

Making a Website

Articles re: Publishing

Low Art

I felt compelled to drop a note to the International Herald Tribune regarding their Monet slideshow.

Dear Editor:

Regarding the article and slideshow ("Monet's Rise from Cartoonist to Artist"), I must take umbrage at the suggestion that cartooning is a Low Art, one from which an artist much rise above. It should be obvious that cartooning is a profession unto itself, not part of a development process. What makes this even worse is your more recent slideshow, "The Art of Smoking," which uses free public domain cartoons as its focus. I suggest the slideshow be re-done with true artists (of the IHT's standards) portraying the act of smoking... perhaps the classic painting "Looks Like Four of a Kind" by C. M. Coolidge.

Yours,

Ted Dawson
Cartoonist

Archie Andrews

A little digital exercise for this morning. Archie Andrews, after Dan DeCarlo.

INN - Illustrator News Network

Irvine illustrator is the picture of success

Author and Illustrator battle it out

Monet the Cartoonist

Barf-O-Rama: Ginger Spice's Childrens' Book

Jean-Michel Cousteau endorses childrens' book

Graphic Novel Review: La Perdida by Jessica Abel

Mr. Men return in new TV series

Australian website that helps you create and share cartoons

Failed Experiment

There's nothing much special about this drawing except that I drew it while trying out a screen capture program. It records a video of screen activity. But it took fifteen minutes to draw in Photoshop, which makes for a long, boring show. I've tried to find a program that will put the movie into fast-motion to bring it down to a couple of minutes, but no luck. I thought doing this would be a fun post, and also helpful to me to see my own process and maybe learn how I can fine-tune it. But since that isn't working out, here's the static image.

Ok, So I lied.

I mentioned before that I was done with my "Toughest man in the world" posts, but I forgot to put a color piece in the package. The protagonist is a dirt miner and he's managed to find some here.

The colors on this were super, but they didn't fit the context of being deep underground, so in with the photoshop. Hackety hack hack.

wes

Hamlet and Eggs

Dash

This is from a special project I worked on with my wife, creator and writer.

Spooner

Tree Part Two

This came out nothing like I'd wanted. But here's a color version of the previous tree sketch. It's Photoshop, and it looks it. I need to upgrade soon so I've a better brush selection.

The frustrating thing about messing up is when you don't know what you did wrong and how to do it better next time.

Luna Moth

I saw this little critter peeking in an upstairs window this morning. He looked to be a pretty big moth I haven't seen before, so I opened the window, stuck the camera outside and took a blind photo. Wonderful surprise when I looked at the photo on the LCD screen! I have never seen a Luna Moth before.

Tree Sketch

Just a little tree sketch in PS.

Today's Spooner Comic Strip

click to enlarge

How To Make Money With Your Blog

Through careful research our crack team of experts has uncovered the secrets to making money with your blog. By following these ten simple steps, you can achieve wealth beyond imagining. You can quit your job and retire in monetary bliss.

Step One: Come up with a cool and descriptive name for your blog.

Step Two: Get a blog

Step Three: Put tons of Google AdSense advertisements all over your blog.

Step Four: Spend an hour or two every day searching for keen stuff on the Internet (you do anyway, right?).

Step Five: Place links to those keen websites on your blog.

Step Six: Get as many folks as you can to place links on their blog or website to your blog.

Step Seven: Buy some Google AdWords advertisements to advertise your blog.

Step Eight: Wait.

Step Nine: Count your money.

Step Ten: Quit your job.

And it's that simple. Your only competition is the other fifty million blogs out there.

P.S. Let me know if it really works.

Wicked

Last night, my wife and I took the "Behind the Emerald Curtain" behind-the-scenes tour of the musical, Wicked - The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz. We had seen the musical a couple of months ago, but for my birthday, I wanted to take the behind-the-scenes tour of this musical I have become so obsessed with.

I'm attracted to the character, Elphaba, a.k.a. The Wicked Witch of the West. I always have been, but Wicked adds layers and layers to her character that I couldn't have ever imagined. Is she Wicked, or is she just misunderstood? I'm very caught up in this wonderful story.

For an illustrator, Wicked is wicked cool! There's just so much for your eyes to see! The details that Susan Hilferty put into the costume designs are just mind-blowing. Behind-the-scenes, we got to see the buttons on the guards' coats...they have OZ on them. And yet, sitting in the audience, you'd never ever see that tiny detail.

We learned that Wicked was being considered as a movie, when a call went to the folks in Hollywood to say, There's music in this story! So the search for a screenwriter for Wicked ended and it became a hit musical.

Wicked is an amazing experience.

As an illustrator, I'd recommend this musical for anyone with an eye for detail. Put in sound-blocking earplugs and this musical is still amazing!
As a fan of theatre, I'd recommend this musical to everyone.

I'm begging my wife for tickets to see it one more time.

Read the book, go see the musical and tell Elphaba, I sent you.

Links:
Wicked, the musical
Wicked, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

Images from the official Wicked web site.

Postcards came in. (Mundane, I know)

I was surprised at how well they came out.

I bought the slightly larger 8.5" x 5.5" 250 set for 80 bucks at overnightprints.com. There's a free option for gloss on both sides that I took. I had some trouble viewing the proofs online with Safari so i just re-uploaded them with Mozilla. The paper is THICK! Colors look great. A few on top had machine marks, but who cares! I will definitely use these guys again.

I tried to write on the gloss with a ball-point pen and it didn't work, but an ultra-fine point sharpie did fine with minimal smearing.

-Wes

A Warm-Up Painting

This is from a piece I found in my sketchbook.
I redrew it, changed some things and painted it this morning as a warm-up drawing.
Originally, in my sketchbook it had some accompanying text below it as part of a story I had written.

Pirate dude.

There's something I like about this guys pants. I wish i could get another assignment that involved pirates. This piece was dumped from the issue BTW.
-Wes

Morning Visitor

This dude was trying to catch the attention of a female turkey in our front yard this morning.

Tree Sketch

Here's a tree sketch I made while watching television tonight.
9" x 12" on 140 lb. Acquarello Watercolour, 100% cotton, hot pressed paper with a Col-Erase black pencil and watercolors.

"I Will Follow You Into the Dark" Video

I fell in love with Death Cab for Cutie's video, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" the first time I saw it.
I love how they tell a story using a sketchbook/picture book dummy.
The power of those drawings + the beautiful music is magical.

Link:
Death Cab for Cutie
You Tube

Draw With Me ....

Artist Nadine Jarvis can fabricate pencils from carbon left over by incinerating human remains -- it's part of a larger "research project into post mortem." She notes that "240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash - a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind."

Someday someone's going to ask you, "How many pencils can the average body make?" And you're going to say "240" and thank me later.

Link:
Carbon Copies

Cover for the final "Harry Potter" book

The cover to the seventh and final Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," has been revealed. It was designed and illustrated by illustrator Mary GrandPre, illustrator for the previous Harry Potter books.

Links:

Mary GrandPre's web site
Harry Potter at Scholastic.com

What do you think of the cover?

B.C., Be Spooner

Not the greatest strip I ever did, but one of the most fun. I'm posting it because it's the closest thing to a tribute to Johnny Hart that I have.

Johnny Hart, 1931-2007

Johnny Hart, creator of the comic strip B.C., passed away on Saturday.

Click here to see the story from Johnny Hart's local newspaper in Binghamton, NY.

In a 1980 interview with Jud Hurd in Cartoonist PROfiles, Johnny said:
"...'cartoony' and 'simplicity' became very important words to me, and I extended them into every phase of what I do..."

And the result was some of the most beautiful linework ever to hit the comics pages. Johnny's work was simply amazing. His linework was sparce, but very expressive.
Simplicity has the illusion of looking easy. It's not. Try drawing a B.C. character with the expressiveness Johnny Hart could achieve with such few lines. It's not easy.

In the above story, Johnny's wife said he died at his drawing board.
There is something bittersweet about that.

Spooner

Lay Down Sally

It took me forever to find the name of the artist for this wonderful illustration. It's by Arthur Rackham, an influential illustrator around the turn of the century, who I should have learned about in school but instead learned about "real" artists and how to make mosaics.

Here's what ticks me off. There are some great books out there that have hundreds of illustrations in them. Yet there are no credits given to the artists. The book I found this pic in had not credits, but acknowledgements. This means the photo or art service. This is a disservice to the illustrator and the reader. It is also, in my opinion, an immoral industry to supply photos of works of art in the category of, essentially, clip art.

Anyways, it took a while but I found it, and discovered that Arthur Rackham was an incredibly talented and prolific illustrator. He illustrated several classic books such as Wind in the Willows, worked with Barry on some Peter Pan books, and there is a website with scores of his illustrations, but I won't put the link up because all it is is an attempt to sell prints and mugs and postcards of his art. Wouldn't he love that? How can someone with no talent themselves stoop to going around pulling bad reproductions of public domain work and make a business out of selling bad prints and matchbooks of the art? (notice the watermark on the Valkyrie illo.)

On the other hand, I'm no big proponent of what modern corporations are doing to keep their properties from falling into the public domain (like Superman), by having copyright laws changed that don't really help creators, just corporations... and "re-creating" characters so that they can legally call them new properties (like killing Superman and bringing him back... a shallow attempt to create a new property from an old one just when the copyright and trademark end was looming near.)

All the corporations, and even some art reps, were sending lobbyists to Washington to fight the Freelance Writers and Artists Protection Act, which would have removed us from anti-trust laws which disallow us from negotiating prices and terms as a group against media giants. It would be nice to have some laws concerning art and writing that actually are in the interest of artists and writers. Making Work for Hire illegal would be a good first step! And how about giving credit to all artists, whether living or dead.

The reason the Laws concerning art are important is because that affects the public attitude toward art.

Critique from Hell

Man! I've had some rough editors and art directors before, but something like this would probably make me shrivel up and die... were it not coming from such a big talent. This is a link to a critique by veteran comics artist Alex Toth (who died last year) on the Johnny Quest pencils and layouts of the very talented Steve Rude. Very harsh, but very accurate. Plenty of good points that we all need to be reminded of when it comes to illustrating scenes and visually telling stories. (link)

Spooner

Time's up!

I'm happily moving on to a new project. I finally got the look of my main character down, so it's time to move on and torment myself with something else.

-Wes

Manganimals

Some quick sketches from a personal project I've been diligently working on.
Don't you just love the physical size of manga?

Wow

Stacy and Wes, I was just going through the blog archives. You guys are awesome. I feel humbled.

Spooner

You know what I used to love was this white gel pen I used to have. Haven't seen any since. I would use it for little bitty corrections, and to create a "screen" effect like in the above strip.

Various

Idiots Guide to Book Dummies

Now that's the way to take a bath!

Thanks for posting about the binding tape, Wes. Would love to see what one of your final book dummies looks like.

We need to think of a better word for "book dummy." How about "graphic manuscript?" "Book Effigy?" "Mockuscript?" "Prototypeset?" There's no way writers would call their submissions "dummies!"

Binding dummies.

One big expense in sending out dummies is having them bound at a print shop (like 3 bucks each). My wife had another idea and that's to use this stuff. We would basically staple it and then bind the stapled edge with tape. She showed me something she had done like that and it looks perfect.

Here's another page.

-Wes

Watered-down Tirade

I miss Calvin and Hobbes. You know why? Because I miss having a cartoonist in the funny papers who actually cared about comics and the state of the profession. I was gonna rant about it, but not much point.

When Berke Breathed quit doing Bloom County, Comics suffered kidney failure.
When Gary Larson retired the Far Side, it lost a lung.
When Bill Watterson folded Calvin & Hobbes, it suffered a massive coronary.
When Charles Schulz died, so did Comics. It's just on life support now, with the media conglomerates itching to pull the plug.

On the bright side, it's almost Free Comic Book Day!

Spooner

Happy Birthday, Stacy

Happy Birthday, Tracy!

This is the front of my twin brother's birthday card this year.

Every year, I make Tracy a birthday card using cartoon characters of ourselves, Stacy and Tracy.
I have fun drawing these two.

Happy Birthday, Tracy!

Spooner

Spooner

Recharging My Batteries in Brown County, IN

Every year my wife's family rents two cabins in Brown County, Indiana and spend a few days there unwinding, playing with the kids and enjoying the outdoors.

I always pack a bag full of watercolors, pens, ink, pencils and paper. But hardly ever draw anything, because I love playing with the kids, playing board games with the family, watching birds, flying kites and going on hikes with my wife.

I did lay on the cabin floor with my wife's nephews and niece and spend some drawing time with them. I drew a dragon standing on a big skull, holding a treasure chest with flames in the background. I drew a jungle scene complete with a lion, tiger, monkey, snake and butterfly.

We had terrific weather this year and had a couple of great thunderstorms at night. There's nothing better than going to sleep with rain pounding on the tin roof of your cabin and lightning giving you a light show on the walls.

Now, I'm back in my studio, inspired and ready to draw!

Spooner

Todays' Spooner comic. (click to enlarge)

Zip-line.

When my sister married in Costa Rica we went on one of these through the jungle. Crazy.

This was done mostly without ink and just a tiny bit on the highlights. The original is 10" high by 15" wide. Strathmore Imperial hotpress. One 22" x 30" sheet costs me 4 dollars and I cut it into 4 of these pieces so this cost me a buck for the paper. Paper is just one of those things that it pays to get the good stuff. This took me all day and it was a pleasure to work on so it's well worth it to me. I messed up the faces on the original, so a little photoshop helped.

I've never been somebody to buy the real expensive brushes. The expensive Windson Newton brushes I've bought almost invariably split. Maybe I wasn't taking care of them right. Plus, a lot of the detail work is with super small brushes that fray easily regardless of the care it seems.

-Wes