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!
