Here comes 2008!... are we there yet?!

Boy, what a year. A year I'll be happy to put behind me.



Professionally, it was a good year. I'm busier than ever with new clients all the time, and a lot of work to keep me busy. I've been taking new steps forward with my artwork and regained a lot of the passion for cartooning that's been lagging some the last couple years.



Personally, it was a crappy year. I lost my oldest brother Patrick, who was also my best friend, in late July, makng me the last one out of four kids. It's been hard, but fortunately I have a great wife and kids which have been my rock and made it possible for me to make it through.



One of the toughest things about being a cartoonist as opposed to a regular office job, is the fact that it's so closely tied to your emotional state. If you're feeling bad, a lot of the time it's still possible to go into the office, go through the motions and still do your job. But as a cartoonist, your job is to be funny, and if you're feeling depressed or upset about something, it's really hard, if not impossible, to put yourself in a funny frame of mind. Afer my brother died,I didn't pick up a pencil for over 2 months. Fortunately, my clients were very understanding and gave me the time I needed to get back in the groove.



I'm doing much better now, but there are still bad days when I really miss my brother and wish I could pick up the phone to call him and shoot the bull with him. I really missed him over Christmas because he always loved Christmas time, and we always found a way to get together to spend some time together.



I hope that 2008 brings happier times.



To anyone who reads this blog, I hope that you have a happy and successful 2008 as well!



Here's a New Years hunting cartoon I did, I hope you enjoy it!

My wife wrote a gag!

My wife Jill called me from work the other morning to tell me she came up with a gag, and it turned out to be a pretty funny gag, so I drew it up!

Most married cartoonists will tell you that their spouses take a mild interest in their cartoons at best. My wife is the same way. So for her to come up with a gag was really exciting for me, the fact that it was a good gag made it even better.... maybe I'm finally rubbing off on her. ; )

Anyhow, here's the cartoon, I hope you like it!

Geoff

Golf cartoons

Just because I've been lazy about posting lately, here's a few golf cartoons I did last week. Enjoy!

Syndication: The childhood dream

The conversation about becoming a syndicated cartoonist, and whether it's even a realistic dream these days, comes up every now and then on some of the cartoonists forums I frequent, and it's probably the hardest part of being a cartoonist to deal with these days. The reason being, is that the golden age of newspaper cartooning is dead and gone, never to return.

Newspaper circulations are down dramatically as more and more people turn to the internet for their news and entertainment. Not only that, but newspapers themselves have been shrinking the comic strips to the size of postage stamps more and more each year, or cutting comics altogether.

But even with all that doom and gloom, the dream is hard to let go.

The reason being, any working cartoonist today that grew up reading the comics section spread out in the middle of the livingroom floor, doing their best to copy Peanuts or Hagar the Horrible, while dreaming about one day becoming a syndicated cartoonist, and being rich and famous, has had this dream at one time or another.

As I've become older, and have worked as a professional for about 18 years now, I've learned from those that are syndicated about the realities of what it's really like to be a syndicated cartoonist, writing and drawing 365 cartoons a year, no matter whether you're sick, don't feel funny, or regardless of what's going on in your personal life.... you have to produce. And those that become rich and famous are very far and few between!

And if you think producing 365 funny cartoons a year is easy, I can tell you now, it's not easy.

But you know what, it's still hard to let go of that dream. Because it's that dream I had when I was a kid. It was that dream that drove me to spend hours and hours drawing while other kids were playing outside, it's what drove me to read every drawing, cartooning, anatomy, writing, and how-to book I could lay my hands on! In other words, it's that dream that drove me to become a cartoonist.

But what do you do when your abilities finally catch up to where you're finally good enough to pursue your dream, but achieving the dream, at least the way you dreamed about it, is no longer possible?... Or metamorphed into something completely different from what you were working toward?

For me, I plan to keep pursuing syndication because that was, as still is my dream. And I would like to be syndicated at least once, even for a short time, so I can at least say I achieved my dream. Then, I'll rework my dreams to fit todays world.

And that's where the internet comes in, but that's another post.......

Edit tweak: This post was inspired by a cartooning buddy of mine, the incredibly talented Mike Cope, who is sending out his latest creation to the syndicates. All the best Mike, I wish you every success! You can see his blog here where he talks about his submission.

New strip idea "Technophobes" - What do you think?

I'm kicking around a new strip idea called Technophobes. It's about the daily struggle we all face in trying to keep up with and live with technology, and how some people have to be drug kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

I'm still debating on whether to have it be a gag-a-day format or have a regular character that's a Technophobe, and have it chronicle his struggles with all the new gadgets, programs, email, cell phones, and thingamajigs, that we all suffer through each day. Right now, I'm leaning towqard the gag-a-day format because there are many different types of technophobes, and different people are afraid or nervous about different types of technology.

Here's a few roughs that I've dooodled out. Let me know what you think of the concept and ideas, good or bad. If you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know those too. : )

Laters!
Geoff

My cartooning process

Just for fun, I thought I would post a cartoon in it's various working stages.

Here's one of my hunting cartoons I just finished. This one started with the idea of that old saying "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". In this case, it was a pretty easy transformation into a gag. I started thinking about hunters in the woods, hunters in the trees, hunters in treestands... Aha! Treestands. Change the word tree to treestand and we're getting somewhere.

So now it reads, "If a treestand falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Then I added to the end of the line, "....It does if there's a hunter in it.". By itself, that's not really too funny, but what if there's a hunter in that treestand when it falls who goes bouncing down the tree, crashing into branches along the way? I would think that would make a sound, and chances are, that sound would consist of a bunch of swearing. Now we're getting close.

This is where the marriage of writing and drawing together create something funny. For the most part, you would like to have your writing be funny by itself, but with a lot of cartoons, it's the combination of the two that make them funny.

Another aspect of humor that applies in this gag is tragedy is funny. Of course, it's not funny when it happens to you, but when it happens to someone else, it can be hilarious. And when it comes to cartoons, the more tragic a situation, the funnier it is. In this case, having the hunter drop straight to the ground is moderately funny at best. But have him hit every single branch on the way down to the ground, increasing his misery with every Whack! Crash! Bam! along the way and now you have something funny!

One more thing, by only showing the feet of the hunter dropping out of the bottom of the picture, you leave the extent of the hunters injuries to the readers imagination, who can make him as bruised and battered as they want in their mind. This is the power of implied violence in cartoons. By letting your reader do some of the leg work by letting them supply the visual in their head of the hunter's eventual condition that they think is funny, you're actually making your cartoon funnier to a wider range of people, because they can make it as tame or crazy as they want in their imagination.

Anyhow, on to the cartoon.

Here's the pencil rough, drawn on 8 1/2in. x 11in. laser printer paper with a red Col-Erase pencil. The image area is around 7 x 9 inches. I don't worry about having my borders ruled out exactly, or that my image size is exact because I can always tweak it to the correct size after I scan it into Photoshop. I like the Col-Erase pencils because I can ink right over them and still see my ink lines clearly, whereas with regular lead pencils, you can't always see your ink lines as clearly because they blend with the gray of the pencil lines, and sometimes don't look as good after you erase. At this point, I hadn't added the treestand yet, but I did soon after I had scanned this.


Here's the inked version of the cartoon. This was inked using a Sakura Pigma Micron .08 pen. I use the .08 for the majority of my work and .05 and .03 for smaller details. I like the using thicker pen most of the time because it forces me to keep thinks simple and not get too caught up in adding details that would most likely get lost after the cartoon is reduced to print size anyway.

Finally, after inking, I scan the cartoon into Photoshop as a 300DPI (Dots Per Inch) Grayscale image. Some cartoonists prefer scanning at higher resolutions, which I will do sometimes, but since I know these are eventually going to be reduced down to 72 DPI for use on websites, I don't worry about it too much. I always save a 300DPI layered version of the finished cartoon in case I ever have to use it for print or make tweaks to it later. Besides, 300 DPI is good for most printing. The only time you really need higher resolution is for high-end print projects on really nice paper.

Anyhow, after scanning in the image, I tweak the brightness and contrast until my lines are nice and dark and fade out the remnents of the pencil lines. Sometimes this takes a couple passes with the brightness and contrast to get it to look good. Next, I adjust the Threshold to make the artwork Aliased, making it straight black and white, removing the grey fuzzies on the edges of the lines. It's best to move the slider bar on the Threshold back and forth until it looks the way you want. I find that right around 128 gives me a pretty good looks without making the lines too thick or thin for the original.

Next, I use my magic wand tool (make sure the Antialiased box and Contiguous box is unchecked) and select a white spot on my image. This will select all the white areas in your image. Then I press Control +H to hide the marching ants. This protects your black lines from being colored over while coloring the image. From there, I use the Pencil tool enclose the area that I want to fill with color using the Paint Bucket tool. (make sure the Antialiased box is unchecked, but your Contiguous box is checked. ) Then, I start filling in areas with the basic colors, the leaves green, tree trunk brown, the sky blue. I do this until I have the whole toon filled with colors, then Deselect the artwork, then go through and select each color with the Magic wand one-by-one to add the shadows or highlights to each color. There are coloring tutorials all over the web that can give you a more detailed idea of how to do this if you're interested in more details.

The last thing I add is the text and word balloons, which I do in CorelDraw 11. A lot of people prefer Illustrator, but I've been using CorelDraw since version 3, so I can do it much faster in CorelDraw. I just import my Photoshop file into CorelDraw, create the word balloons and text on top of the drawing, then delete the artwork and export the text out as a 300DPI Photoshop file. I open the file in Photoshop, drag the text into my cartoon which will create a new layer for it.

At that point, when it looks like everthing is good to go, I duplicate my file, then close my original layered file so I don't accidentally mix it up with the duplicate. I flatten the duplicate, reduce the image size to 72DPI for the web, and do File> Save For The Web, save as a JPEG, and there you go!

This post turned out much longer than I expected, but hopefully you enjoyed it and picked up a tip or two that will help you with your own cartooning!

Laters!

Hunting cartoons

A few months ago I started doing hunting cartoons for Biggamehunt.net, where my cartoons are featured along with another cartoonist, Jerry King.



I know nothing about hunting, but the great thing about cartooning, is that you don't have to know about a subject to create cartoons about it. All it takes is a bit of research to learn terminology and slang about a subject to start creating gags on a subject. From there, you can take a generic situation and twist it and turn it to its extreme conclusion to create a gag.



Here are a few hunting cartoons I've created lately....

The Mad doodler!

I love to doodle to get the creative juices flowing. It's a great time to experiment with different styles and looks of your characters, proportions, and get yourself "thinking funny". Here's a doodle page done with a Flair pen from this morning that I was having fun with, especially the flying monkey kegger from the Wizard of Oz.

Here's another one done in pencil. You can see my Don Martin influence in the feet of the Hula Girl on the top left corner.

Another cartoonist blog?!

I know, like there aren't enough cartoonist blogs out there already. But I figured the world needed at least one more, mine!

The biggest reason I created this blog is because I wanted a place to throw up doodles and sketches and work from freelance gigs, or whatever I happen to be working on at the time that doesn't necessarily fit in with my regular website. But at the same time, it wouldn't be a cartoonist blog without cartoons, so don't worry, there will be plenty of those as well. Old and new work alike.

I don't know how often I'll update since I'm pretty new to the blogoshpere, but I'll try to update regularly.

To get started, here's a couple t-shirt designs I just finished this week. One is for Performance Radiator, featuring Prickly the Cactus, their mascot, dressed as Elvis, singing to a bunch of skeletons of other radiator companies that are defunct or soon-to-be defunct.

The second T-shirt design is for a travel writer buddy of mine Kelsey Timmerman who writes humorous travel articles that are hilarious! You can read his work at www.whereamiwearing.com. He'll be using the t-shirt to give away as prizes for various contests.

Laters!
Geoff