...will he ever win?

John K: The Cheerios Kids Beats Up A Train

JohnK — 2010-09-05T03:37:26+00:00

Here's some fun design from a 50s Cheerios Kid commercial.Besides the design, the other thing I like about old animated commercials is that they tell a story.I like how the real kid accepts the magic of a little super elf that inhabits his cereal.An adult probably wouldn't buy it.Man, look at him shove that stuff into his maw."Thank Heaven for little animated imps who tell me what to eat!""I can

John K: Yogi Defends Boo Boo

JohnK — 2010-09-04T15:48:10+00:00

I did this color in Painter 2 long ago. It was a bugger of a program to use, and it got worse with each new version. I'm not able to do this sort of thing with the later versions.

John K: Grogg VS Orrgo - who is more frightening in short pants?

JohnK — 2010-09-03T21:27:10+00:00

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2010/09/jack-kirby-dick-ayers-steve-ditko.htmlThat website is fantastic, by the way. Lots of great illustrators from 100 years ago or so.

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: SOME MORE FACES TO DRAW

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-09-03T08:12:47+00:00

Holy Mackerel! What a smile (above)! The cheeks are amazing. When someone smiles like this, do the cheek muscles inflate or simply bunch up? If they bunch up, then why doesn't that steal mass from some other part of the face? Almost the whole muzzle gets larger.

Also interesting is the triangle in which her nose and mouth are embedded. They do lose a little mass, but not enough to explain where the cheek bulge comes from. When the triangle stretches out to the sides like this, you can see the features wrap around the vertical mouth cylinder.

I love clothes that wear the human. Here (above) John Carradine is enveloped by a predatory Gaham Wilson jacket . The jacket is the sentient creature, Carradine is merely the conveyance.

What a silhouette! Look at the way the man's features (above) wrap around the front of his head. And that furrowed brow...!

Nanga! Nanga! Nanga! ! I love "S" curves in figure photography (above).

A typical nerd face (above)...or is it? If you imagine a normal hair cut, no glasses and a closed mouth, the guy doesn't look like a nerd anymore. It makes you wonder how many nerds you know that are really normal looking people who dress funny.

Above, a "Z" curve! Also, a fascinating head shape and chest on this girl. The straight hair emphasizes them.

Some girls (above) are self-conscious about having braces, and they try to cover them up by smiling in a strange way. I sympathize. After a lifetime of smiling in a way that covers up my buck teeth, I've learned to let my teeth show naturally. I'd hide them if I thought it would do any good, but there's no use trying to conceal what can't be concealed. Actually, I kinda like them now.

People's whole lower muzzle (above) withdraws into their face and neck when they smile, or at least it seems to. The effect is heightened by the whole head being pulled back and the cheeks being thrust out. Fascinating, eh?

John K: Someone Made This

JohnK — 2010-09-03T04:40:44+00:00

John K: Smith's 7 Year Itch

JohnK — 2010-09-02T18:25:38+00:00

Yep, he's got it. 7 years of dealing with irascible bears and finally he's gonna take some time off to woo his little lonely little wifie-pie.PART 1 - LOVE DENIED"How long have I denied myself the loving embrace of a civilized woman?"PART 2 - WIFIE PUSS WAITS NO MORE

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: AN HOMAGE TO STAGE MOTHERS

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-09-02T08:20:58+00:00

Stage mothers really have a bad rep, but is it deserved? I'm not so sure. The fact is that an awful lot of talented people in the past started doing what they were famous for when they were five, if not sooner. Think of Buster Keaton who lived his whole life on the stage and in front of the camera. Look at what he achieved. Could he have done that if he'd started at age 23 like college grads do today?

Of course, starting early requires focus and that requires a pushy adults. Ditto for getting good work habits. That's why we need stage mothers. You don't want a mother who nags, and bullies, but you do want one that pushes you. I'm not talking about school work, I'm limiting this discussion to professions like music and dancing, auto mechanics, art, etc which can be learned by watching skilled people and practicing, which is the natural way that kids learn.

A few stage mothers in the entertainment industry are famous, and so far as I know were loved by their children: Minnie Marx, mother-manager of The Marx Brothers; Jaid Barrymore, mother of Drew; Gertrude Temple, who managed Shirley and spent hours every day curling her kid's hair; and Judy Garland's mom Ethel Gumm, just to name a few. Where did this myth come from that all stage mothers are evil (Gary Goldman's dad, notwithstanding)?

Stage mothers of the world, this toast is for you. You gave your kids the gift of a trade, of a chance to practice their profession while they were still young enough to innovate and develop a passion for it. Good for you!

Er...is that woman above really female? She looks a little odd.

I couldn't resist throwing this in (above): Judy Garland singing "Texas Tornado" in a completely professional manner when she was only 14. She could do that because her mother arranged for her to learn how to sing while she was still in the egg shell.

Haw! Stephen Rodgers' ably answered my argument with this song (above) by Noel Coward. I have to admit that it makes a powerful argument, but I'm not ready to admit defeat. I was hoping to score on a larger point, namely that people nowadays begin careers too late in life.

To make a big impact you have to start early, so you can turn professional when you're young enough to pour lots of energy and idealism into what you do. Stage mothers add a bit of balance to a school system that wastes youth.

I wish we still had Vaudeville, or an updated version of it. Talentless performers would get weeded out pretty fast if they had to play before live audiences that paid for their tickets.

Bolt City: Amulet 3 in Stores Now!

2010-09-02T04:45:50+00:00

John K: Ranger's Retreat

JohnK — 2010-09-01T23:13:28+00:00

This is a story of man living in idyllic hinterlands.the rundown

Drawn!: Animated Mouk!

David Huyck — 2010-09-01T21:05:31+00:00

Marc Boutavant’s amazing Around the World with Mouk (previously) has been made into a pilot. The video is not embeddable, so I took the above screenshots. See the full pilot here.

(via our friend Claire)

Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: Animation, Marc Boutavant, mouk, pilot

John K: Scum Rules BG

JohnK — 2010-09-01T15:46:32+00:00

This scheme was inspired by a Yogi Bear cartoon called "Stout Trout".I think I have the layouts and maybe storyboard for this sequence. Should I post 'em?

John K: Crystal and Johnny

JohnK — 2010-09-01T05:16:48+00:00

I drawed it, Kali inked it.

Drawn!: Spirit City Toronto

John Martz — 2010-08-31T22:48:56+00:00

I recently snagged a copy of Aaron Leighton’s Spirit City Toronto from Koyama Press.

Inserting drawings of creatures into real-world photos may not be new (see: Monster’s in Real Places, Aaron Brady’s Magic Camera, and Avid Liongoren’s Project 365) but there’s something about Aaron’s simple geometric spirit creatures inserted into the seemingly mundane landscape of urban Toronto that really resonates with me. He manages to turn an environment that’s familiar to me into something otherworldly.

Some excerpts:

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 6 comments
Tags: Aaron Leighton, Books, Koyama Press, toronto

John K: BGS: Layout, Color Key, Finished Painting

JohnK — 2010-08-31T16:02:51+00:00

I wanted my Yogis to have some feeling of the original 195-1960 cartoons. I didn't want them to be like the 1970s, an 80s redos where the characters try to be be with the times. No cleaning up the environment or riding skateboards - and no pink purple and lime green airbrushed bgs. I got Ed Benedict to do some of the background layouts and design and he drew them in pretty much the style he drew

Drawn!: I’ll Get the Ice Cream

John Martz — 2010-08-31T13:43:44+00:00

Loved this perfectly-staged bit of slapstick from Bird Box Studio.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Animation

Drawn!: Plight of the Bumblebee

David Huyck — 2010-08-31T03:55:43+00:00

A bit of animation history to go with Ward’s future-of-animation post. This early unfinished Mickey Mouse short is fun to see, if only for the fact that it is all still in pencils.

(via paul_dini by way of neilhimself)

Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 3 comments
Tags: Animation, disney, Mickey Mouse, short, unfinished

John K: Marker Color Keys

JohnK — 2010-08-30T20:49:01+00:00

I often do marker color keys of scenes to give my painters. I can't paint, so markers are easy for me to dash out.They tend to fade in color over the years though, and I had a heck of a time trying to get the colors to scan right. They also look different on every computer screen I checked, so who knows what colors you'll see.This one is from my Bjork video and the colors here look much less

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: COMIC STRIPS FROM A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-30T18:40:54+00:00

Indisputably in my opinion, the golden age of newspaper comics occurred in the two decades before WWI. It was an era before formulas became locked in, when the field attracted first-rate artists like the one above (click to enlarge). Hmmm...well maybe some formulas were locked in. Editors couldn't get enough of Katzenjammer Kids-type stories where kids torment adults.

Arists that weren't first rate made up for it by being downright weird (above). Here the fruits and vegetables have a picnic, which is disrupted by a cow who eats them.

Editorial cartoons were terrific in this period. How do you like this one (above) by Herriman? No wonder he was a favorite of Hearst.

Some of these pre-war cartoons were incredibly violent. Here (above) a woman is threatened by a mugger and she sticks him with a pin.... in the stomach! Ouch! Good drawings, though.

I love visual stories like this (above). The storyteller was a continuing character, but the strips structure was loose enough to permit almost anything. There was room for imagination. In later years regular characters in predictable situations dominated, and artists were expected to use the same setting, day after day after dreary day.

This is a sore point with me. I wish current editors wouldn't put so much emphasis on regular characters in rigidly defined situations. Aren't you glad that Mad allowed the young Don Martin to draw whatever took his fancy, regular characters or not? Aren't you glad that he wasn't shoe-horned into a sitcom format?

I have a lot of tolerance for racial and ethnic humor when it's funny and not mean-spirited, but even I cringe at strips like the one above. I include it here because it's so well drawn.

More strips like these can be seen at Allan Holtz's "Stripper's Guide:"
http://strippersguide.blogspot.com/

John K: Next

JohnK — 2010-08-30T15:51:13+00:00

I found some BG color keys and one BG from a cut scene from Day in The Life of Ranger Smith if anyone wants to see them.

John K: Heart Throbs

JohnK — 2010-08-29T15:05:05+00:00

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: THE INCOMPARABLE ANNA MAGNANI

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-29T01:21:25+00:00

Anna Magnani is arguably the best actress of the film era. What a treat to see her in a film (clip, above) with Marlin Brando in his best period. The film: Tennessee Williams' "The Fugitive Kind."

Magnani's great here. Brando has to get out of town to escape the law, but Magnani thinks he's leaving to be with another woman. When he tries to push past her she grabs his precious guitar and won't let go. That's such a Magnani thing to do! She fights for her man. She won't take no for an answer. He slaps her and she just takes the slaps and holds on.

But Brando knows he's got a real woman. In another sequence (on YouTube, not shown here) a beautiful girl throws herself at him and he says disdainfully: "Look at your wrists, they're so thin. I could snap them like a twig with two fingers. That's not the way a real woman is." The real woman is Anna Magnani, who has wrists like Popeye.

My only criticism is that the script doesn't give Magnani enough to say. She needed more lines. Maybe the studio was afraid Magnani would outshine Brando. Or maybe Williams slipped up. Maybe Magnani couldn't learn enough English. I wish I knew.

From another film, here's (above) Magnani playing a wife whose husband is taken away by the fascists, maybe to be shot. Magnani's a real woman. When her man is threatened she battles her way through a gauntlet of armed soldiers to get him back. When you see this you say to yourself, "Now that's what love is. If you're not willing to do that for your significant other, then you're not really in love."

Here's (above) Magnani and a beau taking a walk in the woods. What's so special about a walk you ask, but when Magnani does a scene everything is special. Her feigned helplessness is beautiful to behold. Watch the first minute and a half, and don't be put off by the documentary footage that begins it.

Thinking about "The Fugitive Kind" reminded me of Brando's performance in that film. Here's (above) the standout first sequence of that film, beloved by caricaturists and impressionists everywhere. It's one of Brandos funniest.

John K: UFC 118 Tonight

JohnK — 2010-08-28T22:33:30+00:00

They are marketing it as boxing VS MMA.I can't wait to see what happens. Lots of other great matchups too.http://www.ufc.com/event/UFC118

John K: Striving For Accuracy

JohnK — 2010-08-28T15:59:17+00:00

I wasn't satisfied with my last Beebers; I knew there were subtleties I was missing, so I looked closer to try to figure out what I wasn't capturing.And I came up with this.Here are some more "serious" studies of celebrity childs and magazine people.This stuff busts my brain.But I think it's slowly paying off.

Drawn!: The Eagleman Stag by Michael Please

Ward Jenkins — 2010-08-27T02:49:13+00:00

Trailer for The Eagleman Stag by UK animator Michael Please. I need to see this film.

For a recent screening at the Royal College of Art, Michael set up an installation, featuring bits and pieces from the film:

Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 6 comments
Tags: Animation, Michael Please, short film, stop motion

John K: Beautiful Beeb

JohnK — 2010-08-27T02:03:52+00:00

Girls, calm your poor hearts...I sort of applied what I remembered from drawing gym shoes the other day.

John K: Beautiful People 27

JohnK — 2010-08-26T13:46:03+00:00

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WOMENS FASHION IN THE 50S

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-26T09:07:48+00:00

It's tempting to think of the 50s the way the fashion magazines portray that period (above), with every woman wearing space-age fashions. i don't think that's the way it was, not in the early 50s, anyway. So far as I can tell, most women then dressed simply, the way women dressed in the forties. They all looked like Milt Gross women.

Women of this period who couldn't afford Mink coats wore mink "stoles" instead. Stoles were entire dead animals: face, paws and tails, stitched together and draped over the shoulder.

But change was in the air. There must have been a lot of new wealth around because, by the mid fifties, more and more women began to dress the way they did in magazines. They even began to mimic the poses they saw there. They'd linger coquettishly in doorways, languorously lean on things, and playfully walk along anything elevated, just to show off their new clothes.

Then as now, photography always favors models who look other-worldly (above), and seem to have disdain for the human race.

I imagine that fashionable 50s women must have followed suit by snubbing everyone around them. If there were no strangers to snub, then they snubbed a friend.

"Brain" coats became popular at this time. Somebody invented a fabric that looked like the kind of fur that poodles have, the kind that's curled into black brain convolutions. The coat above is only partially brain-covered, as if the poodle it was removed from had mange. It looks good though.

Some high fashion never filtered down to street level, thank God. Paris tried to foist ugly, tent dresses on women, and they refused to accept them.

Girdle ads of the period (above) are fascinating. Models had to strike classical poses, frequently next to pillars. They were very classy and aloof.

That's very odd, because the dresses that were made to show off the conservative girdles (above) were often outrageously sexy.

Lots of girls I knew when I was a little kid wore dresses like the "Chubettes" one above. The ad says they were for "chubby lasses." Gee, maybe I live around a lot of fat girls.

Were pajamas (above) an invention of the fifties? I love wearing them, but I confess that in an entire lifetime I've never had a pair that fit.

If you can trust the magazines and films of the period, transparent baby doll nighties (above) were all the fashion. None of the women in my family wore them but when I a kid was I was convinced that all the beautiful women in the neighborhood had them, and thinking about it drove me nuts.

By the late 50s all that magazine fashion had evolved into the rock & roll look. What a decade! It started with the conservative Milt Gross look of the 40s, morphed into Paris-influenced magazine fashion, and ended with the "Long Bang Fall (above)." Geez!

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: "CRIME WAVE"

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-26T05:49:11+00:00

Thanks to recommendations from commenters Paul Penna and Mr. Goodson2, I just rented this film (above) from Netflix, and I'm happy to report that it's SENSATIONAL....a must see film for fans of noir, direction, mise-en-scene and Stirling Hayden.

The trailer's on YouTube, but take my advice and skip it. It makes the film appear amateurish and boring, which it isn't. Instead take a look at this short video (above) about the film's director, Andre De Toth. He's the same guy who directed the underrated horror film, "House of Wax."

Jack Warner wanted to use Humphrey Bogart here, but De Toth held out for Sterling Hayden (not shown above), and it's a good thing he did. Hayden delivers what may be his best ever performance here. I'd kill to do his detective character in animation. That guy with the cards (above) does a pretty good job, too.

The film is wonderfully composed and shot (much better than in the example above), which is doubly amazing when you consider that it was made on location in only 14 days. De Toth is obviously the guiding genius, but I want to find out who did the camera work and lighting. I even want to know who scouted the locations. De Toth's Los Angeles is like nothing you've ever seen before.

Extras on the disk include "Decoy," a flawed but interesting noir film from 1946. The film runs out of gas fairly quickly, but the first 15 or 20 minutes are hilarious. Also included is a Crime Wave commentary by none other than crime novelist, James Ellroy. John K watched it with me and hated it because every time Ellroy saw something he liked he dog-panted into the microphone. I kinda liked it myself.

John K: Stiff Warm Ups and Studies

JohnK — 2010-08-25T19:20:23+00:00

I am slowly, painstakingly trying to beat new information into my brain.2 things I have been working on are facial structure and legs - with attention to balanced poses and how they work. Like many cartoonists, my eye lies to me a lot and I naturally draw things out of proportion.I think I am just beginning to understand how the major facial muscles and features interrelate with each other. The

Drawn!: Jay Kennedy Scholarship for Cartooning

John Martz — 2010-08-25T17:43:04+00:00

I had the privilege of being asked to create the poster and postcard for this year’s Jay Kennedy Scholarship. The scholarship, named after the late King Features comics editor, is given out each year by the National Cartoonists Society Foundation at their annual Reuben Awards banquet.

If you are a student in North America who cartoons or draws comics, and you are heading to university or college (it does not have to be art school), you are eligible.

Visit the site for information on how to apply.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 6 comments
Tags:

Drawn!: Gabrielle Bell Comicumentary from the San Diego Comic-Con

Matt Forsythe — 2010-08-25T14:53:51+00:00

Gabrielle Bell’s Comicumentary from the San Diego Comic Con.

Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

via BoingBoing

Bonus: Jillian Tamaki at Comic Con.

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: comic-con, Comics, gabrielle bell

John K: Owen Fitzgerald Dennis Christmas trees

JohnK — 2010-08-25T03:51:38+00:00

Level 1: Overall Tree Shape- Green bent triangleLevel 2: Tree trunk and branches structure, inside green shapeLevel 3: Sub branches coming off horizontal branchesLevel 4: Needles coming off sub-branchesEach of the levels is following the shape and direction - and line of action of the level above. Every detail fits within the overall schemeVery artistically cleverThese trees, as stylized as they

Drawn!: Sin Titulo by Cameron Stewart

Matt Forsythe — 2010-08-24T17:08:16+00:00

If you haven’t been reading Sin Titulo by Cameron Stewart – go check it out. The weekly webcomic is about a guy investigating the death of his grandfather and gets sucked into a surreal underworld. It’s over 100 strips deep and it just won the Eisner Award for Best digital comic. I ate the whole thing in one sitting and loved it.

ICameron says the comic is “a series of personal exercises for me, one of which is to allow myself to be comfortable with less-than-perfect artwork, as long as the storytelling is clear.”

He also did a little YouTube walkthrough of his illustration process… (Wacom Cintiq in Manga Studio, then shading in Photoshop.)

Also of interest:
The Other Side by Cameron Stewart
Cameron Stewart Illustration Blog

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: cameron stewart, Comics, Webcomics

John K: Carlos Nine

JohnK — 2010-08-24T01:18:49+00:00

JoJo turned me on to a cartoonist I didn't know about. Carlos Nine combines illustration and cartoon skills into one fantastic style.I'm hoping Jojo will scan the pages Nine drew with Popeye and Olive for us. You'll die!I think you can buy Nine's comic, Meurtres et Chatiments here, but I'm not sure how:http://www.stuartngbooks.com/preview_nine_meurtres.htmlhttp://ronniedelcarmen.blogspot.com/2007

Drawn!: How’s business?

Luc Latulippe — 2010-08-23T23:16:32+00:00

I’ve been talking to a lot of illustrators lately, and everywhere it’s the same story: times are tough. Extremely tough.

I’m curious to know how other illustrators out there are doing, so I created two quick little (informal and rather unscientific) polls. The first asks how your assignments are doing this year; the second asks how well those assignments are generally paying.

I hope you’ll take a second to, uh, “vote.” Comments are also enabled on both polls at Illustrators: How many jobs are you getting this year? and Illustrators: How well are your jobs PAYING this year? if you’d like to add more information. And if you have ideas on how to make your illustration business profitable during These Hard Economic Times (drink!), please feel free to share them.

Posted by Luc Latulippe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 11 comments
Tags: Business, economy, Illustration, poll

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: A DINNER I WON'T FORGET

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-23T02:22:26+00:00

Before I start, let me apologize for taking the Pizza Boy story down. It's only temporary. I'll put up an improved version soon, and I think you'll like it a lot better. I had trouble with Beta Blogger, which isn't set up for the kind of photo stories I like to do, but it gets better every day and, well...you can't argue with the price. Thanks to Roberto, Jorge, Rooni, Fritz and Ben for the kind comments on that post.

Fortunately, I have another pizza story ready to go, this one taken from real life...

A few days ago I had dinner in a pizzeria and I noticed what appeared to be a dad and his four kids wolfing down pizza in the booth next to me. They seemed like a nice family and I gave in to the temptation to eavesdrop. I'm glad I did, because what they said was fascinating!

I only heard bits of it. If I got it right, the dad had a small contracting business, which fit the way he looked: like the actor, Ned Beatty. He seemed like an average Joe, a nice guy who was probably skilled and did good work. He wasn't very eloquent or talkative but you could tell that he was enjoying his kids immensely.

Three of kids talked mostly to each other about video games, friends, rock music; the usual things ten year- olds talk about. The fourth kid, the one closest to the dad, was animatedly telling him about his internet business, which was buying and selling sci-fi figurines on ebay. The kid was bragging about the deals he made. He relished the details and the dad obviously relished hearing about them.

So what, you ask, made this dinner so special?

It was special because the kid seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to his dad. Let that sink in for a minute. He actually thought talking to the old man was fun. When's the last time you saw that? I guess he thought of himself as a businessman, just like his dad, and it was fun for him to compare notes with a sympathetic peer.

The dad, who had the kind of stiff, cigar store indian face that most men have, was nevertheless beaming. He was in Seventh Heaven because his son was talking to him just for the sheer pleasure of it, and maybe because he knew he could be useful to a son like that, and would never have to worry that the kid would grow up rudderless or penniless. I got the feeling that the dad would remember that night as one of the best in his entire life.

When the family got up to go, I felt like shaking the kids hand and giving him my wallet. What a gift he gave to his father! What a son! What a night!

John K: Beautiful People 27

JohnK — 2010-08-22T21:02:53+00:00

John K: Some Photos From Flagstaff Festival

JohnK — 2010-08-22T16:23:24+00:00

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: THE PIZZA DELIVERY BOY

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-22T09:20:19+00:00

EDDIE THE DELIVERY BOY: "Hi! Eddie the pizza delivery boy here! Uncle Eddie asked me to say a few words to his readers about the pizza delivery business. I guess he thought it might be a thrill for you guys to hear how a modern pizzeria gets its product to the customers."

EDDIE THE DELIVERY BOY (VO): "I know, I know....you want to know what it's like to be a pizza delivery boy. And who can blame you? It's an exciting life, no doubt about it, but there's more to it than meets the eye. Behind the glitz and glamour is the story the public never hears...."

EDDIE THE DELIVERY BOY (VO)..."It's a story of courage and dedication, of clutching a pizza to a warm breast in a snowstorm...of boys cut down in traffic, bravely holding the pizza out of harm's way while their bodies are crushed under the wheels of giant trucks. They don't tell you about that in school, do they?...but it's a reality we pizza boys have to face every day of our working lives.

Let me tell you a story about one of the greatest of all pizza deliverers, a real legend in our business. He has a long name, which I'll shorten to "Pizza Boy."

EDDIE THE DELIVERY BOY (VO): "It begins on a dark and stormy night......"

SFX: (THUNDER & LIGHTNING), (LOUD KNOCKING ON THE DOOR)

PIZZA BOY: "Pizza's here! Smokin' hot, on the spot! Heavenly pleasure for you to treasure!"

Add caption

ZOMBIE BUTLER: "Beat it! We don't want any!"

PIZZA BOY: "Heh, heh. You obviously haven't heard me correctly, Sir! This is the pepperoni pizza you ordered. It's sublime. The Food of the Gods!

But I warn you: some customers love this pizza so much that they begin to believe the pizza loves them. They have a relationship with the pizza, almost an affair. They burst into tears when the time comes to eat it. Remember Sir, that it's purpose is to give soft and gooey pleasure. I beg you to feel feel no guilt when you take the first delicious bite!"

TO BE CONTINUED......

Note: This is an awkward place to end this, but I had no choice. Beta Blogger's giving me so much trouble that I can't continue. I'll try to resume the story on Sunday but Blogger does system fixes on that day, so that might not work out either. *Sigh!* Anyway, I'll do the best I can.

John K: Cartoony Principles 1: Contrasts

JohnK — 2010-08-21T17:53:36+00:00

I did this drawing the other day in a private lesson as an example of exaggerating what you see by using the principle of contrast.My student had copied this Preston Blair drawing above and had drawn the proportions too conservatively. The baby's head was too small in comparison to his body. I'll ask him if I can use the drawing to show you, but basically he undertured it.He was actually trying

John K: A Classic Cartoon Face In Real Life

JohnK — 2010-08-20T15:55:33+00:00

Ingrid Bergman has a great facial structure. She has very strong defined bones and then really distinct cheeks, lips and nose and eyes sticking out of, wrapped around and sitting within them.Unfortunately, in these glamor photos you don't see them quite as well as you can in her movies. I think the publicity department went out of its way to try to hide her most interesting features.She has a

John K: Kirby Back 3/4 Heads

JohnK — 2010-08-20T01:18:55+00:00

This is an angle I've always found hard to construct.I love the way Kirby does it.

John K: Vintage UFC

JohnK — 2010-08-19T18:08:00+00:00

I found these the other day. They are from the Golden Age of UFC in the mid 90s. I'm sorry I don't have higher rez versions.That's Tank Abbot above. He is my all time favorite UFC fighter - not because he always wins, but because he's a true bully. A great winner and poor loser - but he's always super entertaining. I wish he would get into shape and get back in the Octagon. I always thought that

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF JAMES ELLROY?

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-19T17:42:19+00:00

It occurred to me that in my post on writers James Ellroy and Elmore Leonard I forgot to include a sample of Ellroy's writing. Ill make up for that here with a couple of brief Ellroy interviews. He writes the way he talks, so this should give you an idea of what the writing's like.

Ellroy talks in short sentenses with short words. It's a very lean style. In the interviews he comes off as obsessive, which doesn't surprise me. I think all good literary stylists have compulsive disorders. They write whether they get paid for it or not. You have to write an awful. awful lot to get the kind of feel for words that they have.

The trick is to avoid getting seduced by your own beautiful words, and to never neglect the content. Good writing is always about something that's worth knowing.

YouTube has several videos where Ellroy talks about Elizabeth Short, the famous "Black Dahlia" whose corpse was found surgically cut in half in Hollywood in the forties. His own mother was murdered when Ellroy was a kid, some (not Ellroy) believe by the same killer. The two murders are always on Ellroy's mind. I'm surprised that Ellroy is able to keep focused on a subject he's spoken and written about so frequently through the years. Maybe this is another example of how you have to be an an obsessive compulsive in order to write well.

Maybe the tragic crimes gave him a nucleus around which he could grow a compulsion. Maybe the best writers need compulsions for fuel and deliberately set about to acquire and nurture them. Or maybe I'm trying to over explain something that's simple and doesn't need an explanation. I don't know. Anyway, I love the way Ellroy talks.

John K: Beautiful People 26

JohnK — 2010-08-19T01:02:23+00:00

Log Cabin republican crybabyThis guy stumps me.

John K: Low Hairline Action and Other Forms Of Natural Beauty

JohnK — 2010-08-18T18:27:00+00:00

"I'm filthy rich and no one knows why"Crappy ones

John K: Private Lessons

JohnK — 2010-08-18T17:43:54+00:00

I started giving private lessons to a fellow named Tommy who moved out to LA from the midwest to pursue his dream of being a top Hollywood cartoonist and getting beaten down by the man. I ran into him at the supermarket the day he arrived and he dropped his eggs all over the floor and did a Tex Avery take. "You're....HIM..." Jesus. I almost called the manager. Then he demanded lessons. I took

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: FILLER

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-17T16:03:58+00:00

I hate filler. I hate it in books, cartoons, films, food...you name it. Filler sucks.

I particularly hate it in books. The other day I was in a used book store and I was infinitely saddened to see how many books were overwritten, or were stretched out versions of what should have been long magazine articles. You can blame publishing's woes on computers and TV, but that's not the whole story. The truth is that the reading public is also re-acting negatively to the glut of wordy, needlessly long and expensive books which have come out since the late forties.

Why all the filler, and why did it appear in that time period? I don't know. I only know that books (excepting biographies) were tighter before WWII.

You see the filler problem everywhere. It's in art books which are full of super wide margins and wasted white space. It's in histories which hardly ever address themselves to what readers want to know. I don't want a book with a sappy title like "Brother Against Brother: The Civil War." I want a book called "Why the South Lost the Civil War," or "Why Sherman was an Ineffective General."

Maybe publishers are too focused on coming up with the one expensive big seller that will appeal to everybody and make lots of money. Maybe they'd do better if they issued a larger number of books at a much cheaper price, with more specific titles.

BTW: The filler book store I visited wasn't "The Iliad" in North Hollywood, which is pictured above. The Iliad has as much disdain for filler as I do.

John K: Kirby Wrinkles

JohnK — 2010-08-17T08:04:23+00:00

John K: Classic Kirby Faces

JohnK — 2010-08-16T13:28:00+00:00

John K: Tezuka Studies

JohnK — 2010-08-15T17:10:00+00:00

Boy it's amazing how little has changed since Tezuka started this style.

John K: Kirby Effects and Graphic Textures

JohnK — 2010-08-15T13:24:00+00:00

These all predate the famous iconic Kirby cosmic dots effects he used so much from the 60s on.

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: PHILOSOPHY GIRLS AUDITIONS (PART 1)

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-15T09:33:01+00:00

EXT. THE THEORY BUILDING, HEADQUARTERS OF "THEORY CORNER. INC."

HUNDREDS OF EXCITED SINGERS AND DANCERS WAIT TO BE INTERVIEWED FOR SLOTS IN "THE PHILOSOPHY GIRLS," THE WORLD'S FOREMOST GIRL PHILOSOPHY REVIEW.

INT. THEORY BUILDING: ON THE APPLICANTS:

BUTTERCUP: "Only two slots left, and there's dozens of girls ahead of us. It doesn't look good!"

AT THE HEAD OF THE LINE:

INTERVIEWER: "Nice job, Lily! You sing and dance, you know your philosophy, and you're able to handle tough questions. Congratulations! As of this moment, you're a PHILOSOPHY GIRL! Report to Theory Mansion on Monday and we'll introduce you to the gang!"

LILY: "GASP! I can't believe it! it's been my dream since I was a kid! Thank you! Oh, THANK YOU!"

BUTTERCUP: "Aaaaargh! Oh, great...now there's only ONE spot left!"

BUTTERCUP: "Lily, you gotta help us out here. We're DESPERATE! Please, please; what questions did they ask!? They wanted to know about the Positivists, right?"

LILY: "The Positivists? No, not the Positivists. They were mainly interested in the manly Greek and Roman thinkers...some Enlightenment people...a little on Ayn Rand. "

BUTTERCUP: "Oh yeah, Ayn Rand.... (GULP!) AYN RAND!!!???? I haven't read ANY of her books!!!"

SUNFLOWER: "Neither have I! She was a follower of Nietzsche, wasn't she?"

DAISY: "Nietzsche!? Rand REPUDIATED Nietzsche! She liked him for a while in her youth, and that was it."

GLADYS: "EEEEWW!!!! Who let a KID in here!? Beat it, Pee Wee. You're too young to be a Philosophy Girl!"

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT POST......

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: PHILOSOPHY GIRLS AUDITIONS (PART 2)

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-15T07:05:28+00:00

VIOLET: "Well, maybe she's right, Gladys. Rand says we're born with fundamental rights, which no Nietzchean Superman or Leviathan state can morally withdraw."

IRIS: " 'Sounds good Violet, but the Utilitarians had another way of looking at it. They said the purpose of the state is to bring about the most happiness for the most people. It would be hard for the state to do that unless it had a lot of power. "

PETUNIA: "But who decides what makes you happy? Hitler? Stalin? Rand says it's not the job of the state to make you happy. It's the job of the state to protect your right to make yourself happy, whatever way you choose, provided you respect the rights of others to do the same. It's right here in the Declaration of Independence...our 'inalienable right to life, liberty and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS!' "

OUTSIDE, ON THE LINE OF APPLICANTS:

GLADYS (VO): "GOOD GRIEF! ANOTHER KID!!!! What's this, the PHILOSOPHY BABIES!!??

MAGNOLIA (VO): "I don't know, I think she's kinda cute."

GLADYS (VO): "See if you think so when you end up having to clean her turtle bowl!"

Stephen Silver

stephen Silver — 2010-08-14T18:21:26+00:00

I just wanted to share a great e-mail I just received from one of my online students.

Dear Stephen,
I new when signing up for this online character design course that there was no way I would regret it. I new this because of the amount of passion I witness during your Live Art Casts and your inspirational sayings to everyone via Facebook. But I honestly was not expecting the class to be this helpful and this full of information, it was so much more then I could have asked for. You made the steps for a person to become successful in this industry understandable and clear. I can honestly say that you covered everything and more with full detail and life experience. This is the class people need to take in order to be on the right track to getting into the art industry and to learn how to grow as an artist. It blows my mind how much I've improved since the day I've started this class to now. In such a short period of time I can finally feel proud of my work and feel more confident in succeeding. Your videos were jam packed with the right steps, perfect advice, your own life experience and they really helped me so much I cannot even express it. This class was better then any art class I've ever taken and any art book I've ever read. It was just perfect so once again, I can't thank you enough for clearly putting so much effort into helping your students make their dreams come true. Your advice throughout the lessons will come in handy throughout the rest of my life. It has been an honor and a pleasure being your student. -Lauren Lorenzo

John K: More Beauties

JohnK — 2010-08-14T15:53:10+00:00

John K: Kirby's Wide Stance

JohnK — 2010-08-14T13:22:00+00:00

The characters in Kirby's comics must have really loose groin muscles to be able to push their feet so far away from each other.I love this stuff.

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: BETA BLOGGER SUCKS!!!!!!

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-14T08:55:10+00:00

It erased most of what I attempted to post, and i'm too sleepy to start again tonight. Sorry about that!

John K: Kirby Aliens

JohnK — 2010-08-13T14:16:00+00:00

Do you love Kirby aliens as much as I do?I can never figure out whether they are supposed to be funny or serious.I hope they meant to be taken seriously because that makes them even funnier.

Drawn!: Help a lady out? UPDATE!

S.britt — 2010-08-13T06:24:09+00:00

I’m sad to report that the phenomenally talented, Ignatz award winning and dear friend to people and pets alike, Laura Park, is in sore need of emergency back surgery (specifically, a discectomy). Even with insurance, she still needs to raise $3500 which she hasn’t got, and that’s where you, Drawn’s faithful and charitable readers, can help.

She has set up a donation page to help offset the cost of the surgery and any amount you can spare will be greatly appreciated. And in return, you will be highly rewarded knowing you’ve helped out an extremely gifted artist return to the craft she loves; creating comics and paintings that are sure to slap a crooked smile on your face and plant an olde tyme song in your heart.

Oddly enough, Laura was featured on Drawn! nearly three years ago to the day, regarding the subject of artists and lower-back pain.

AMAZING UPDATE! Thanks to everyone’s extremely generous donations, Laura reached her goal in less than two days! I know that things are awfully tough right now in this lousy economy, and that’s what makes this miraculous achievement especially touching. Thanks so much from Laura Park and Drawn! for reaffirming our faith in the charitableness of the artistic community.

Posted by Stephan Britt on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: back surgery, Comics, discectomy, donate, featherbed, Ignatz award, illustrator, laura park

John K: DON'T FORGET FLAGSTAFF

JohnK — 2010-08-13T00:30:57+00:00

If you happen to live in Arizona, drive over for Saturday or Sunday's show.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/07/ill-be-at-flagstaff-film-festival.html

John K: Kirby Is Killing Me

JohnK — 2010-08-12T16:48:22+00:00

I know you're dying for an exlanation of that crying tree.It all started with an assignment I have to draw an illustration using some Marvel characters in my style.My idea was to do a cartoony caricature of Kirby. As you can see, this is not an easy task.I'm trying to come up with one good pose of Crystal from the Inhumans.So far, not happy with any.Drawing girls is hard enough.Trying to draw

John K: Kirby Before Marvel: Anatomical Structure

JohnK — 2010-08-12T14:58:00+00:00

The Kirby style most people are familiar with is the superflat 70s and 80s Kirby. At least that's the style people generally imitate when they draw in his style.I love his 60s Marvel superheroes, not just because of his iconic surface stylings, but because of how solid his drawings were. You can see that even better in his earlier comics.Kirby is known for making up muscles that don't exist, but

John K: Thanks To Donators

JohnK — 2010-08-12T14:26:39+00:00

Thanks to all these folks and I hope you are getting something out of it!BTW, I have started my first private and semi private lessons. Rather than having one all-encompassing course that each student has to fit into, I am tailoring classes to the individual's needs and their stage of skill. If you live in the LA area and are interested, put a comment and a link to some of your work.Classes would

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: THEORYBOY INTERVIEWS MILT GRAY

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-12T07:45:27+00:00

Well, slightly exaggerating. Above, the heroine of Milt Gray's new web comic, "Ms. Viagri Ampleten."

Sepia sketches by John Kricfalusi

Greetings Theory Cornerites! Uncle Eddie here. That's me above, second from the left. You know, we've interviewed many celebrities on this site: Sammy, Dean, Frank, and even Bob Clampett, but none has been as tall as our present subject, Simpsons timing director, animator, Clampett fan and web cartoonist, the 6' 6" "Tower of Power," MILT GRAY. "Hi MILT!"

MILT : "Hi, Uncle Eddie! Wanna see my latest drawing of Viagri Ampleten?"

UNCLE EDDIE: "Sure! Wow! She certainly is...(gulp!)...ample. So this is your new web comic character! She's a spy, right?"

MILT: "Well, not exactly. She's a free agent. Sometimes she works for the government, and sometimes for private people. She takes on the really dangerous assignments that no one else wants to touch."

UNCLE EDDIE: "How does she decide what jobs to take?"

MILT: "Good question. Well, she's more likely to take a job that gives her scope to follow her hobby, which is sex. She's on a crusade to liberate people from their sex hangups."

UNCLE EDDIE: "Uh oh! There goes your 'G' rating."

MILT: "'Not worried. I'm after whatever rating makes sense for the stories I'm telling. I figure the readers will tell me how graphic I should go."

UNCLE EDDIE: "How did you figure out the format? There can't be many web comics that scan the way yours does."

MILT: "Yeah, it works great, doesn't it? It came about because the project started as an animated cartoon, and the panels were meant to be layouts. That's why they're all the same size. When I decided to do a web comic instead, it seemed like a natural outgrowth of that to put them in a column and let the reader scroll down. I guess I was lucky, because everybody seems to like it that way."

UNCLE EDDIE: "How did you color it?"

MILT: "Well, I xeroxed the original drawings down to a size my scanner could take, then I just fed them in. The color was done on Photoshop by my color stylist, Cynthia Macintosh.

UNCLE EDDIE: "I'll put a few of the panels up (that's them above, cropped badly by me, and in a different format than the one Milt uses. I was just too sleepy to do it right). Boy, you can tell that an animator drew them."

MILT: "Thanks. There's a lot that's different about this comic. I hope it influences things. The web is a great vehicle for comics, and it'll get even better if we continue to experiment."

Milts web comic: http://www.viagriampleten.com

John K: Toy Interlude

JohnK — 2010-08-12T05:37:02+00:00

Drawn!: Arthur de Pins Goes to the Beach

Leif Peng — 2010-08-11T20:57:22+00:00

Its been five years since Arthur de Pins last appeared on Drawn! (courtesy of D! head honcho, Johnny Martz). I only heard about him for the first time today.

Boy, does this guy ever make great pictures!

With Drawn! on summer vacation, I thought a look at a couple of de Pins beach scenes would be most appropriate for this post.

But don’t stop there. Visit Arthur de Pins’ website and goggle ALL his amazing artwork (and you don’t have to chase the images all over the place in the ARCHIVES).

* Tip o’ the hat to Jamar Nicholas for the heads-up.

Posted by Leif Peng on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Arthur de Pins, Illustration

John K: Ron Ferdinand Interview 2

JohnK — 2010-08-11T15:28:37+00:00

b) Who were all his ghosts?The names I recall are Fitzgerald, Al Wiseman, Lee Holley, Bob Bugg and later Frank Hill….there were a few more that escape me at the moment. (Marcus Hamilton - jk)http://www.dennisthemenace.com/marcushamilton.htmlWhen did Ketcham start using assistants?I think he did the whole enchilada for the first year or two.Who did the Sunday pages in the 50s and sixties?Y’know ,

John K: Inked Asses

JohnK — 2010-08-11T01:11:03+00:00

Here, I added some sick colors like the execs love.Mitch inked these Little Asses for fun and he did a swell job.He also did these.Here's how he did it:http://mitchoo.blogspot.com/2008/09/ink-tricks-tutorial.html

John K: What Do They Eat?

JohnK — 2010-08-09T20:01:02+00:00

The colorful asses are full of superabundant love energy. Their tails gleam with magic and Ass Power(TM). But where does all this color and energy come from? From nature's generous bounty.My Little Asses eat an all natural organic diet of butterfly wings. The colors in the wings imbue the Ass-Tails with magical properties.Sensitive Ass-nostrils seek out the tastiest wing-colors. Little hungry

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WHAT MADE JOHNATHAN WINTERS SO GREAT?

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-09T19:01:02+00:00

Jonathan Winters (above) is an interesting guy. You can spend a lifetime in the entertainment business and never come up with an appealing character, and here's Jonathan Winters who comes up with new ones by the cartload every time he speaks. What was his secret?

I'm not sure. Maybe it had something to do with Winters being mischievous. People like that quality. Maybe that's why mischievous people make good joke tellers. They make you aware of the absurdity of the fact that you just dropped something important to listen to something that's going to be incredibly stupid.

I don't remember many jokes, and I'm not really good at telling them. What I do remember is the way they were told. I love the way joke tellers look both ways then grab your arm and lean in furtively. I love the whole ritual that's associated with joke telling. Mischievous people are experts at creating the atmosphere that precedes a joke.

In animation you know you've got a good character if you start laughing before he even talks. Good characters have ignorant charisma. Funny things happen just because they're in the room. The air fills with electricity and potential just because a force of nature has arrived, and is checking out the room. For me the joke is of far less importance than the set up.

John achieved this with Ren and Stimpy. In his best period Winters achieved it every time he opened his mouth.

Drawn!: Humble thanks

Jaleen Grove — 2010-08-09T15:39:07+00:00

Bailey Digger of WebDesignDegree.com just alerted us that he has compiled a list of fifty illustration blogs.

Drawn! is number one. Second place is Today’s Inspiration, by Leif Peng, who is also one of Drawn’s contributors. The list goes on to cite many of our colleagues with whom we have been trading links for several years. Digger’s list is a nice, easily bookmarkable resource for enthusiasts, professionals, and art directors.

Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 12 comments
Tags: blog, drawn!

Drawn!: Cul de Sac with Commentary

John Martz — 2010-08-09T14:07:27+00:00

Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson has started posting his strip daily strip on his blog along with “some kind of commentary or apology or justification”. I like to think of it as the DVD director’s commentary for my favourite comic strip.

And as someone who lives and dies by his RSS reader, I can say that this is now the best way to read the strip online.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: comic strips, Comics, Richard Thompson

Drawn!: Love & Theft by Andreas Hykade

John Martz — 2010-08-09T13:30:16+00:00

My mind is officially blown by this animated short, Love & Theft, by Andreas Hykade. It’s a strange psychedelic love letter to cartoons. The short’s Andreas quotes Bob Dylan’s In the Summertime in the video’s info panel:

And I’m still carrying the gift you gave,
It’s a part of me now, it’s been cherished and saved,
It’ll be with me unto the grave
And then unto eternity.”

This, along with the short’s title (also cribbed from a Dylan album) suggests that this short is about artistic influences permeating one’s consciousness, and becoming a part of the fabric of one’s own creativity. I will assume Andreas is a similar age to myself judging by the equal amount of reverence he gives to Sesame Street, Peanuts, Spongebob, Wallace & Gromit, Spider-Man, Fleischer cartoons, the Pink Panther, and Jim Woodring. The sad thing about YouTube, especially with animation, is the inability to navigate through something frame by frame.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: Animation

John K: My Little Ass Babies

JohnK — 2010-08-08T16:05:47+00:00

Drawn!: Sensology by Michel Gagné

Adam Koford — 2010-08-08T06:40:39+00:00

Michel Gagné (previously) has posted his animated masterpiece Sensology to youtube. I won’t embed it here, because it must be viewed in HD. Here’s a link to his site, with some insight into the work he put into this marvel:

Sensology was handdrawn (painted) with a Wacon tablet at first, and later, a Cintiq, using Photoshop. The drawings and frames where then composited and manipulated in a 2D software called Animo. There is no vector animation at any point in the film.

I’ve watched it several times now, and see something new with each viewing.
Via Cartoon Brew.

Posted by Adam Koford on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 3 comments
Tags: Animation, jazz, Michel GagnÃ©

John K: Trying To Draw Small

JohnK — 2010-08-07T19:28:01+00:00

One of my drawing problems that I wish I could solve is that I draw too big.So this morning I tried to do tiny caricatures.It's extra hard for me because I tend to get distracted by details and I magnify them.I'm hoping that drawing small will force me to see the major shapes better. So far I'm sloppy.

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: JONATHAN WINTERS IMPROV

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-07T07:55:23+00:00

All three of these YouTube videos are of Jonathan Winters, from the period when he first started to do improv on TV.

He was far and away the greatest hero of my childhood. Unfortunately he was only on late at night when I wasn't allowed to watch. To see him I had to wait til my folks went to sleep, then sneak downstairs in the dark, taking care to avoid creaking floorboards and barking pets. I'd feel around for the TV controls in the dark, then with infinite patience slowly turn on the set, with the brightness and sound almost as low as they could be.

The films you see here include some of the very same sketches that I watched in the dark. I never saw them with this clarity, though. The screen was always so black that I could barely make out the shapes as human, and I had to press my ear hard against the speaker to hear what was happening. My grandfather was a light sleeper and more than once he caught me and terrible yelling ensued. Then there were the ghosts, but I won't go into that.

I guess you appreciate what you have to make sacrifices for. All these videos have great meaning for me.
I read somewhere that the young Bach had to do something similar in order to get access to his dad's music library. His father was certain that his oldest son would be the musically gifted one, and didn't want Bach, the little kid, to get a taste for something that was so obviously beyond his meagre ability.

John K: The HB I Like

JohnK — 2010-08-07T04:01:24+00:00

I don't like Tom and Jerry at all. I do like Hanna Barbera's TV cartoons from 1957 to about 1962. Really to about 1960. They are fun cartoons to eat breakfast with.They were on to a great thing for kids and then dumped everything good about it really fast.The color and design in the early HB cartoons is pure candy.I also like the simplicity. Simple, that is but with a method. Not simple without

John K: Walt In The Tabloids

JohnK — 2010-08-06T22:48:00+00:00

Here it is in this week's Globe magazine.I'm sure it's all made up but it would explain a lot if true.

John K: Do Tabloids Reflect The Tastes and Beliefs Of Most People?

JohnK — 2010-08-06T20:56:42+00:00

I think they must.After all, they are the biggest selling magazines in existence. They are at every cash register in every supermarket.Even I buy them. I like to draw the celebrities, but I sometimes read the articles and wonder "Do people really care about this stuff?". Even more puzzling to me are the things that the Tabloids sell to the readers: Elvis plates, Dead Babies, The Noble Wolf

John K: Bobby Driscoll's Story

JohnK — 2010-08-06T18:24:47+00:00

More wacky tabloid lies...Driscoll as rugged "garbage". (his word)Actually I always thought that Walt hired boys who looked like him when he was a kid because all the child stars have a similar look in Disney's films.

John K: Hi

JohnK — 2010-08-06T18:04:37+00:00

What happened to Bobby?

John K: Did It Work?

JohnK — 2010-08-06T15:03:57+00:00

I wonder how they come up with this stuff.

John K: Next Shocker!

JohnK — 2010-08-06T06:04:52+00:00

No...it can't be true. How dare they.

Bolt City: Comic-Con 2010

2010-08-06T02:32:58+00:00

We had a wonderful time at the San Diego Comic-Con 2010. In fact, we had such a great time that I decided we have to come back with the Flight booth for Comic-Con 2011. The one week out of the year where we get to spend time with so many of our wonderful friends is just too special to pass up. We already have a huge group of Flight artists planning to attend next year, so be sure to get badges as soon as you can (they sell out quick!) in order to meet all of us and help us celebrate the final installment of the Flight series. Click here for more pictures from the event, taken by master photographer/emoter Eric Wu.

John K: In Progress

JohnK — 2010-08-05T21:15:35+00:00

Still got some details to finish...like another arm for Johnny.Well it's not really a caricature of Kirby's style. it's more of a combination of him, Mad comics and Not Brand Ecchh - and me.

Drawn!: Eyewitness Reports Art Auction

Ward Jenkins — 2010-08-05T20:21:08+00:00

As part of the release of Mac Barnett and Dan Santat’s OH NO! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World), Dan has gathered over 30 artists (including Calef Brown, Mo Willems, Jon Klassen, Tom Warburton, Kelly Murphy, and myself, plus many more) to create some artwork to be auctioned off to support 826LA. Here’s Dan’s words on this event:

As a parent I can relate to the frustrations many parents must have in finding any decent place to help educate their kids. Here in California we suffer from state budget cuts and schools continue to suffer from even more budget cuts when they already have nothing left to lose. So I gathered up some friends. A little over 30 children’s book artists (any more and my head would have exploded), and they did their own interpretations of Mac’s book “OH NO! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World)”and starting August 23rd people can begin buying pieces off of eBay. (There will be two auctions, one starting August 23rd, and another starting on August 30th.) There will also be a gallery show where all the pieces will be on display at the Nucleus Gallery starting August 14th. I will also be selling very limited edition prints from the book to go towards the charity as well as copies of the book itself.

Here’s the official site for the show: Eyewitness Reports.

Here’s Dan’s post on the show and auction: Eyewitness Reports: A Charity Art Auction in Support of 826LA.

Gallery Nucleus’s page on the show: Eyewitness Reports.

Oh, and here’s a video to promote the show as well (made by Dan himself):

Posted by Ward Jenkins on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: art show, auction, children's books, Dan Santat, Events, Mac Barnett

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: ROBERT CRUMB'S SURPRISING NEW BOOK

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-05T07:56:54+00:00

The book (above).....

....and the author (above), Robert Crumb.

He chose his subject well. Genesis is a true masterpiece, arguably the best book of its kind ever written, regardless of the religious convictions of the reader. It's also pretty doggone weird.

The weird parts start with the old age of Noah.

Noah (above, click to enlarge)) has too much to drink and falls asleep naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham, happens to see his father naked and tells his brothers about it, maybe (I'm not sure) in a humorous way. The brothers are appalled and take pains to cover the father before he's seen by anyone else.

When Noah awakens and sees what happened, he's outraged and condemns Ham's son to slavery. Why Noah chose such an extreme punishment, and why he took it out on Ham's kid isn't clear. There's tons of Jewish and Christian commentary on this, but I'm not familiar with it.

I don't think it's fair to say that God justifies slavery in this story. At this point in history the Jewish faith doesn't exist yet. Genesis is chronicling the prehistory of that religion, when Hebrews shared most of the beliefs and prejudices of the society around them. The writer has God take a special interest in them, but we don't yet know where that interest will lead. Even so...it's weird.

Afterwards, God is compelled to take sides in endless disputes among the Hebrews. A deity who recently had been involved with the creation of the universe and was steeped in the mechanics of black holes and such, was forced to mediate zillions of oddball disputes among sheepherders.

Surprisingly we don't question it, maybe because the atmosphere in Genesis is alive with growing potential. In the writer's view, these people are being nudged inch by inch toward a more sophisticated law and a higher destiny. It's what Merlin tried to do to Arthur and his friends in the film "Excalibur."

Surprisingly Crumb tells this story with great understatement and empathy. The book is worth having.

John K: Nice Pencil Work From Assorted Animation Studios

JohnK — 2010-08-05T02:00:31+00:00

Here are some good animation pencils in various stages of clean up and in assorted styles.What makes them good is not the quality of each individual line itself, but rather the ability of all the lines to contain the forms within them. All these pencils reveal that the artists understand that the characters are made of forms that all make sense and fit into a plan that adds up to instant

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: HAVE YOU HEARD OF THE "DANDIZETTE?"

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-04T17:47:14+00:00

The dandizette is a female English dandy. Their peek period coincided with that of the male dandy, roughly from 1810 to 1820.

Dandizettes hung out with male dandies. Even though they were women, some of them adapted the speech and habits of male dandies. That's bizarre when you remember that male dandies were imitating women. It's a case of women imitating men who were imitating women. Geez!

Wait a minute, let me backtrack. I implied that all dandies were gays, and I didn't mean to say that. I imagine that the great majority of dandies were heterosexual and completely masculine. Disraeli was a dandy. Dickens was something of a dandy in his youth. Even so, I feel justified in hazarding a guess that gay men had something to do with the founding of dandyism. They started it, but a big portion of it passed into the hands of heterosexuals.

Dandizettes are with us even today, witness John Allison's "Fop Catcher" (above) (copyright John Allison 2009). Some modern girls just like to hang out with dandies. I'm not talking about hetero girls who have gay men friends. That's different. I'm talking about hetero dandizettes who fall in love exclusively with male hetero dandies.

Is anybody following what I'm saying here? I wrote it, and even I have trouble understanding it.

Girls are strange. They seem to prefer men who are either ultra-masculine, or who look and act like girls. No doubt the truth is more complicated, but I make no claim to possessing the truth.

Were dandies of the Regency period really as over the top as they were portrayed in etchings?

I hope so. It makes the period much more interesting.

While we're on the subject of dandies, I think I'll take a shot at answering Paul's comment about whether or not metrosexuals are todays dandies. It's an interesting topic.

I do think that Regency dandies will be found to have had a greater intellectual impact on succeeding generations than metrosexuals, and that's because they were better versed in culture. Go to iTunes and listen to Stephen Fry's podcast on language. Fry doesn't dress like a dandy, but he was influenced by that culture, and you'll hear for yourself how powerful dandyism is when its allied to a good classical education.

John K: Naked Dead Baby With Dangling Parts Cut Off Construction

JohnK — 2010-08-04T03:25:40+00:00

This has to be the cheapest character design ever.It's just a construction model for a stock 40s baby character.It's such a funny concept to have a character without a design or any details at all. Even ears are too expensive to draw!There are a million characters based on this construction, but this is the only one that is nothing but construction.Here it is with ears and clothes:Here he is with

Drawn!: More vintage Japanese illustration and design

Matt Forsythe — 2010-08-02T18:30:22+00:00

Will Schofield shares another slew of fantastic Japanese illustrations from books he’s collected. The above is a children’s book cover by Seiichi Horiuchi from 1972.

Susumu Eguchi Illustration, Poster for a children’s science exhibition in the Tobu department store, 69-70

Book spreads, artist unknown, ca. 1964
(please leave a comment if you know who this is)

Haruyo Kawashima, illus. for Kansatsu ehon kindabukku, vol. 6, no. 7, 1933 (detail)

See the rest at Will’s blog.

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 6 comments
Tags: Design, Illustration, japan

Drawn!: Tourists in Paris by Rick Tulka

John Martz — 2010-08-02T16:27:10+00:00

Enjoy this collection of drawings of tourists in Paris by Rick Tulka.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Drawing, Rick Tulka

Drawn!: Oh, Brother! by Bob Weber Jr. and Jay Stephens

John Martz — 2010-08-02T16:07:23+00:00

Today King Features launches Oh, Brother! a new comic strip by my friends Bob Weber Jr. (Slylock Fox) and Jay Stephens (The Secret Saturdays, Tutenstein, Oddville). Bob and Jay have a true love for and a history of making great kids comics, and Oh, Brother! is no exception. The strip follows a rich tradition of mischievous cartoon kids, and its clean designs and pure silliness make it the perfect heir to John Stanley’s Little Lulu.

Oh, Brother! is also the first syndicated newspaper comic strip to be given the full webcomics treatment of being delivered free online on its own clutter-free site, as opposed to being trapped in the ugliness, lack of RSS, and near uselessness of sites like Comics.com, GoComics or King’s own Daily Ink.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Bob Weber Jr., comic strips, Comics, jay stephens, Webcomics

John K: Pete Emslie Wants To Share

JohnK — 2010-08-02T06:18:03+00:00

Pete sent me this picture. At first I thought it was an ad for a glass eye manufacturer.Pete: "I'm certainly more the Disney fan than you are, but even I'm getting really bad vibes about this film. "

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: ABOUT ELMORE LEONARD

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-01T19:32:51+00:00

Who's your pick for the best living American novelist? Wait, just to be fair let me amend that to the best practicing living novelist. Don Delillo? Bret Easton Ellis? Tom Wolfe? Let me weigh in with my own pick. So far as I'm able to tell, the best novels being written now are genre novels, and the best genre novelists are crime writers Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy.

It's confusing because these guys write alike, look alike, and their names even sound alike. Both believe in lean, dialogue driven prose with minimal third person narrative.

I remember when books that were mostly dialogue began to make big sales. Everybody thought it was the end of civilization because we took it as a sign that modern audiences were too dumb to appreciate good narrative. I used to think that too, but I've since changed my mind. The fact is that only a few writers of the 20th Century were ever any good at narrative. The ones that weren't plodded along in that vein, because they thought it was expected of them, and that produced some pretty bad books. Like Taylor Caldwell's, for example. Try reading a couple of random lines from "Ceremony of the Innocent" (1976), reproduced below (click to enlarge)........

Do you see what I mean? Professional but boring is how I'd describe it (above). A real sleeping pill. Now sample (below) the leaner, more effective style used in Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" (1990).........

Nice, huh? Dialogue carries the scene, and it works beautifully. Leonard's a good practitioner of the new style. Shakespeare told his stories with dialogue, and so can we, provided the dialogue is good.

My only criticism of this lean style is that in our time it's worked best in genre novels with flamboyant, over-the-top characters. Will it work for other types? Only time will tell.

Leonard's a terrific stylist and amazingly he's willing to share how he does it. Here, from the internet, is an abridged version of Leonard's top ten tips for writers. It starts with an admonition to avoid adverbs, then goes on to.........

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his bookArctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

BTW: I added something important to the Bette Davis post immediately below, to the part about Mankiewicz. Take a look!

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: MY LAST (AND BEST) BETTE DAVIS POST

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-08-01T19:10:20+00:00

This'll be my last Bette Davis post for a while. I hate to put an end to this, but I think I'm boring everybody. Well, I'll go out with a bang by putting up what has become my favorite Bette/Joan Crawford story.

Here it is, as told by Bette's daughter in her book, "My Mother's Keeper." I think the daughter is about twelve years old here (below). The incident takes place on the set of "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?", which as you know, costarred Betty Davis and Joan Crawford, who both hated each other. Both women took their children to the set with them (click the book pages to enlarge).

Add caption

Great story, huh!? Geez, my admiration for Joan Crawford doubled when I read this. I tacked on a little of the next paragraph about Joan's boobs because Bette's reaction to them was so funny.

On a different topic: a lot of critics consider "All About Eve" (1950) to be the high point of Bette's career. It wasn't, not by a long shot. There are some terrific lines in it, but she doesn't deliver them right. Don't take my word for it, see for yourself. Here's (above) her most famous line: "Buckle your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night." See what you think.

Did you watch it? Then you see what I mean. Bette's way too restrained. The line calls for style and she reads it almost straight, like it's just information. I don't entirely blame Bette. I also blame her director friend William Wyler, who someone on the net credited with talking her out of her over the top approach to everything. This is a story that requires over the top.

I also blame Joseph Mankiewicz who wrote and directed the film. Mankiewicz writes great dialogue but he was an inept director in this period. Look at the boring compositionh in the picture above. That's how Mankiewicz shoots the most memorable line in the film. Can you believe it? It's the lamp's scene, not Bette's.

Sometimes it seems like everything and everybody in the film is more important than Bette. In other scenes (not shown in the clip) even the maid, Thelma Ritter, is allowed to upstage her. What was Mankiewicz thinking of? He inexplicably downplays the star and lets everybody else go over the top.

And what's with the awkward dress and the super wide hair style that de-emphasizes her face? What's with the flat lighting? What's with the camera angles that make the star look short and dumpy? Did Mankiewicz even like Bette Davis?

BTW: The awkward paragraph spacing in this post and others comes courtesy of Beta Blogger, which has great potential if the bugs can be ironed out.

John K: Kirby Fantastic Four Covers

JohnK — 2010-08-01T03:56:09+00:00

I was obsessed with these comics when I was a kid.I didn't start buying them until 1966. Before that I thought the drawings were too bizarre.Once I got hooked I wanted to buy all the back issues.Luckily, in those days there was always a garage sale every weekend where some kid would be selling all his comics for a penny each so I went and bought all the issues dating back to the beginning.It was

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: AAAAARGH! TOO SLEEPY TO POST!

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-31T08:23:51+00:00

I'll put up something good tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon!

Drawn!: About Portland Oregon…

Jaleen Grove — 2010-07-31T02:55:59+00:00

I was in Portland, Oregon for a conference on Visual Communication in June. (Yeah, it’s almost August; yes, I’m that far behind). I just have to post about the whole darn city, it’s so great. Normally in any given town I only find about three shops that truly appeal to me… in Portland, there are whole neighbourhoods filled with them! Indie bookshops, Powell’s Books (the mother of all second hand book shops), vinyl record stores, vintage clothing, antique stores specializing in the weird, artist-run galleries, more artist run galleries, craft and art museums, restaurant patios, and multiple brew pubs. And it’s pretty affordable to be a tourist in, with good public transit, almost as many bicycles as Amsterdam, and cheap eats.

Normally we post on specific artists here on Drawn, but I’m going to praise the whole city, because a supportive city helps the arts flourish – and Portland seems to have done a great job of it. The civic planners and the artists deserve credit. I didn’t get to all the arts districts, but the Alberta Arts District really works well. There, you can find places like Together Gallery, and Monograph Bookwerks, which specializes in fine art books. The photo above MIGHT be from Together’s back area… it had a great selection of zines and other DIY… I didn’t do the greatest job of keeping track what I photographed. Maybe someone can confirm??? I also loved Ampersand Gallery, which has vintage ephemera, art books, and a lot of things related to photography.

If I were American, this is where I would go live and draw….

Below: street art on Alberta Street.

Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 15 comments
Tags: Art, galleries, portland oregon

John K: Your Favorite Comic Titles

JohnK — 2010-07-31T02:55:12+00:00

Alley Oop had the best dinosaur and jungle drawings.No one can forget Catman.Felix and the bulb-noses - a kid favorite.Henry was once beloved by millions. The "Funniest Living American". He doesn't have a mouth. Is he Popeye's bastard son?.Smokey Stover must be the wackiest comic ever. A big influence on Clampett.I love this Oswald drawing!Comics are for everybodyWalt Kelly Snow WhiteDon't you

John K: Ukrainian Ranger Mating Urges

JohnK — 2010-07-30T17:12:32+00:00

Yes, every spring the Rangers come out of hibernation to spread their pheromones around the Urals.The garish males perform spectacular displays to impress the blander female of the species.Ranger Horst goes all out, puffing his breast, spreading his feathers and finally extending his perfume bladder which emits a pungent odor - offensive to we civilized folk, but quite pleasant to female Rangers

John K: Who wants to see THE HE HOG MOVIE?

JohnK — 2010-07-30T14:56:05+00:00

I pitched it. They laughed. We'll see...PROFESSOR MOLE AND HIS EVIL INSECT BMF THREATEN ARMAGEDDON!THE BRAIN THAT PUNISHED A PLANETThis is Professor Mole's brain. It is packed with dangerous ideas. Moles grow on it in front of our very eyes. They devour his thoughts causing his scalp to tingle with a burning urgency too intense for our puny imaginations to contemplate.This is Professor Mole,

Stephen Silver: Art book summer sale

stephen Silver — 2010-07-29T20:27:11+00:00

Summer sale on my passion for life book. by clicking the link below will take you to the site.
Click for more information

John K: Look What's Coming

JohnK — 2010-07-29T05:43:07+00:00

Actual good printsUncropped!No DVNRNo Line ThinningNo Grain RemovalJust the films as they were meant to be seen

John K: I'll Be At the Flagstaff Film Festival

JohnK — 2010-07-28T01:30:21+00:00

Join me at the Flagstaff Film Festival in Arizona, Saturday August 14th!!!A brand new independent film festival.JOHN K. PRESENTS A KIDDIE MATINEE shows from 1:00 - 2:30 PM at the historic Orpheum Theater in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona.I suggested this event because I remembered that when I was a kid, they used to have Saturday matinees with old cartoons, comedy shorts and dinosaur movies. I

Drawn!: Animation Kills Illustration, and… Call for Submissions: YouTube Play: Biennial of Creative Video

Jaleen Grove — 2010-07-27T17:22:26+00:00

OK, I’m back home now from 12 days of ICON followed by San Diego Comic-Con. At both events there was a lot of talk about how 2-D illustration is (once again) “dead”. Previously killed by photography, illustration is now suffering death-by-animation. Or rebirth, as many point out. Naturally, the debate was instigated by Adobe, purveyor of motion-graphics software, and publishers such as WIRED and the NY Times, who are increasingly moving to online and iPad delivery. Graphic media writer Michael Dooley in Print Magazine’s online presence has assembled comments from ICON attendees about it. By the way, the RSS feed on Imprint’s column for illustration is worth subscribing to.

Of course, just as the illustration community is discussing the impending motion-graphics turn as the event of the immediate future, those who have been immersed in it are already sticking it in the museum. You animators might like to submit your work to this exhibition being curated by the Guggenheim:

Developed by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with HP, YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. …Now through July 31, 2010, participants are invited to submit new or existing videos created within the last two years at youtube.com/play. Submissions may include any form of creative video, including animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos, and entirely new art forms.

Meanwhile, more illustrators are transitioning into gallery venues with their still images. The photo here is of the exhibition opening at Nucleus Gallery, showing works by attendees at ICON. Is this where illustration art will increasingly go if motion graphics is the medium of the future?

Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 16 comments
Tags:

John K: I like this Harvey artist too

JohnK — 2010-07-27T14:36:44+00:00

This is the other Harvey artist that draws the characters in a really appealing style.http://davekarlenoriginalartblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/steve-muffatti-friends-salute-to-unsung.html

John K: Free: Clampett Frame Grabs To Study

JohnK — 2010-07-27T06:38:00+00:00

Here are some great frame grabs from Clampett cartoons thanks to Chris Lopez. His site is a wonderful resource for cartoon and comic lovers.Daffy in his absolute prime. Look what an appealing design that is!More teeth in Clampett cartoons.Best eyes.Funniest poses- this is McKimson here! He never drew like that in his own cartoons!This is the best cud chewing scene ever animated. Chris..please put

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WAS BETTE DAVIS CRAZY?

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-26T16:06:57+00:00

The way I heard it, John Huston was so taken with Bette's over the top rage in "Of Human Bondage," that he was hot to do a film with her which would be one long mad scene. With "In This Our Life" (1942) (above) he finally got his chance.

The expressions Betty makes in this film are not to be believed. She must have spent a lot of time in front of mirrors at home, figuring it all out.

You have to admire her for putting so much into a role that made her look evil and crazy.

Bette was a live action cartoon character. I can't believe that no modern animation studio except Spumco ever attempted to use poses like this.

Animation fans talk about Disney's Cruella de Vil as if she were the ultimate example of villainous cartoon acting. She's okay, but she can't hold a candle to Bette (above). Disney should have pushed Cruella farther.

Here (above) Bette begs a dying old man to help her get out of a crime she committed. He's only moments away from meeting his maker and can't force himself to pay attention to her.

She's outraged at his self-absorption (above) and gives him a piece of her mind. The last thing he sees on Earth is Bette screaming at him. What a scene!

Oooch! Big mistake (above)! Never slap a crazy person, not unless you want to find arsenic in your morning tea.
Look at the way Bette reacts to the slap.

Bette plays crazy so well, that it's hard to resist wondering if she was crazy in real life. I wish I knew. She certainly had a reputation for being hard to get along with. Her daughter wrote a vitriolic "Mommy Dearest"-type biography, called "My Mother's Keeper" which I'm reading right now, but there's no way of telling if the book is reliable.

That's Olivia de Havilland above. I digress to include her here just to call attention to the number of good manhandling scenes there are in the Huston film. We could do this easily in 2D animation, but you're not likely to see it in computer films. In 3D the polygons would interfere with each other and produce a hideous monster.

Back to Bette acting crazy: Vincent Sherman, the director of my favorite Bette film, "Old Acquaintance," had an interesting story to tell about it. He said Bette gave him a lot of trouble at the outset of the film but eventually became friendly. Even so he got the feeling that he was walking on eggs, and had to be very careful.

One day, near the end of the project, Bette confided to him that she loved him, and he didn't know how to respond. Soon after her husband (or boyfriend...I can't remember) came to visit Sherman and advised him, for his own good, to be careful, that having an affair with Bette would be like taking a bull by the horns. The implication was that Bette was crazy. The affair never occurred, and Bette and Sherman parted amicably.

Sherman looked forward to working with his old friend on their next film together, "Mr. Skeffington," and was shocked when, with no warning, Bette showed up on the set ready for war, and loudly refused to co-operate with Sherman on absolutely anything. The entire shooting became a famous disaster.

So was Bette crazy? I don't know, but does it matter? If she was crazy we can be grateful that she channeled that craziness into her art, and by doing so redefined film acting.

John K: More Boring Warmups

JohnK — 2010-07-26T01:16:00+00:00

yeesh

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WHAT KIND OF ADS SUCCEED ON THE NET?

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-25T17:32:01+00:00

The answer is: Almost none. Almost no ads succeed big on the internet. The truth is, it's a lousy place to advertise. It's kinda sad because advertisers are throwing dollars at the net these days, and they're not going to get most of them back.

Okay: iTunes, ebay, Amazon, porn, airline and hotel booking agents, gambling and dating services are making out like bandits on the net....but, really, who else is? Try to sell detergent or coffee on the net. You can't.

Try asking your friends this question, and see what answers you get: "Can you name an ad for a product you discovered on the net, (but not on Amazon or eBay) that gave you an intense desire to own it?" I bet you'll draw a blank. Nobody takes internet ads seriously. It's odd because we can all name print and TV ads that had that made us salivate. I'd kill to have TV products like AirHog or a Fushigiball or a bladeless fan. I'll bet my daughter is mulling over Boody Pop right now.

Maybe the net's a bad place to advertise because it's a bad place to tell stories. Print and TV excel at stories, and the net doesn't. That's important to know because fiction, or documentary that's structured like fiction, is what drives sales on TV. You buy Donald Duck Orange Juice because you've grown to like and trust Donald Duck on TV, and you secretly believe that Donald will somehow know you've bought his juice.

In my opinion advertisers made a big mistake in not supporting print and broadcast media, even when their audiences declined. The net's not a great place to discover a new product, but it's a killer place to follow up on a desire that's been planted in your head by another medium.

BTW: John K just told me how he would advertise on the net if given the chance, and the ideas were brilliant. That prompts me to amend what I said here to something like, SO FAR advertising hasn't worked well on the net.

John K: Beautiful People 25

JohnK — 2010-07-25T05:03:15+00:00

Important pelvic wrinkle mechanics.The way girls' arms bend backwards always baffles me. I'd like to get a cartoon version of this but I'm struggling to figure out how it works. I toned it down too.

John K: Canada's National Treasures

JohnK — 2010-07-24T17:29:05+00:00

Did you know that Canada produced both the world's greatest actor and the greatest supermarket?I was molded by these commercials and there are even earlier and more thrilling Shatner/Loblaws commercials. Are there some Canadian commercial collectors out there? Help educate the world and share our cultural heritage. I'd also love to see the old Dominion commercials too. With the "Mainly because

John K: This Guy

JohnK — 2010-07-24T01:06:22+00:00

John K: Does All This Human Drawing Help Cartooning?

JohnK — 2010-07-23T08:13:22+00:00

Honestly, I'm not sure yet.I'm realizing that I use a whole different type of thinking when I copy live humans (or photos of them) than when I draw cartoon characters and I haven't yet figured out how to link the two types of reasoning.Boy I see even more mistakes when I compare the drawings to the photos after I blog them. Like many cartoonists I tend to shrink open spaces when I copy real

Drawn!: Peter Slight

David Huyck — 2010-07-22T20:51:58+00:00

I’m really enjoying these paper-cut shadowbox pictures made by UK artist Peter Slight. There are big ones and small ones, and he’s got other goodies in his Flickr portfolio as well.

Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Illustration, paper cuts, Peter Slight

John K: Caricaturing The Body

JohnK — 2010-07-22T18:35:29+00:00

Sure, people have funny heads but doesn't the body deserve some ridicule as well?I remember when I was a caricaturist at a theme park during summer break, my caricature boss told me what I was doing wrong: "You aren't drawing the heads big enough. A 'caricature' is when you draw a really big head and a small body. - oh and you take one feature -like the nose, and you make that really big too. -

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: MY RANT ABOUT MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-22T16:42:39+00:00

Where would you rather live? Here (above).........

....or here (above)?

Which is easier on the eye? This (above)..........

....or this (above)?

Listen to my rant against modern architecture on the latest ASIFA Archive podcast, link below:

http://www.ahaapodcast.org/

And on another subject.....

Holy Cow! It's time for The San Diego Comic Con!!!!!!!

In a few hours all the LA cartoonists will have migrated to San Diego. Almost none of our ilk will be left in the city. The studios will be dark and empty. Computer screens will flicker aimlessly, and automatic urinals will flush needlessly. Here and there a lonely and unloved curmudgeon will do his miserable work in silence, believing that his absence down South is somehow making a statement.

To everybody else: may you find what you're looking for in San Diego! Good hunting!

This blog will resume after the convention, on Sunday night, July 25th!

Drawn!: 35 Movies in 2 Minutes

John Martz — 2010-07-19T22:59:57+00:00

35mm from Pascal Monaco on Vimeo.

Sarah Biermann, Torsten Strer, Felix Meyer, and Pascal Monaco crammed thirty-five of their favourite movies into this slick 2-minute piece of motion graphics. The animation makes this a refreshing change of pace from the countless “minimalist movie poster” designs littering the Internet these days.

Can you name all thirty-five movies?

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 18 comments
Tags: Animation, movies

John K: a couple days off

JohnK — 2010-07-19T18:54:57+00:00

sorry I haven't posted anything, but I will catch up in a couple days.

John K: Heartaches Stickers Are Here!

JohnK — 2010-07-17T17:46:33+00:00

Holy crap are you gonna have fun with these.ONLY AT MY STORE___________________________________________SEE A HEARTACHES STORY HERE

John K: Teeth Help People Be Specific

JohnK — 2010-07-16T17:45:35+00:00

No two people have the same tooth personalities.I've been noticing how important the shape of peoples' teeth are to their individuality. If you don't get the teeth shape right it can lose the likeness.Below is my breakdown of a very famous set of chompers. First I figure out what the whole mess looks like as an overall shape - each person's bar of teeth has its own unique shape. Then I break it

Drawn!: Drawing Inspiration

Jaleen Grove — 2010-07-16T14:49:53+00:00

I’m at ICON in LA, and if you’re in the area you really ought to try and get in to one of the events.

At the book table, I was really excited to find this textbook for drawing by Michael Fleishman. As someone who has taught drawing in the past and may do so again in the future, I have to say there are very few textbooks I would recommend. Instructional books have never been terribly exciting – you best learn to draw by drawing, in my opinion, and the old classics like The Natural Way to Draw and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain are still good. But kinda boring.

Fleishman’s book is for illustrators, for a start. Secondly, it isn’t one person’s magic-bullet how-to book. It’s more a compendium of advice from dozens of contemporary illustrators, using their words. Third, there are billions of images in all styles – from the high realism of the cover image (by David Bowers) to the best crudest sketch to the most wacked out stuff. Fourth, although it features work and words from some of the current hottest illustrators, it isn’t limited to them. There’s input here from every kind of illustrator, many of them instructors. While the general flavor is “American” looking, it includes artists from all over the world. Finally, this is the ultimate how-to book for people who hate reading, typeset with lots of headings with text broken up in swallowable amounts, that you can open it at random, scan, and get something out of.

Although it offers the most to those who know the least, I also found it interesting to read what people I know are saying about their own work. Perhaps the most fabulous aspect of the book is that it imparts not just great tips and approaches to drawing, but it communicates a way of life. It has things to say about Fulfillment. For people like us who live and breathe the making of images, and want to learn more or initiate someone else into this life, this is the illustrator’s guide to the galaxy.

UPDATE

There was a request for me to post some shots of the page layouts, so with Michael Fleishman’s input I selected the following:

As you can see, there’s a great balance of images and text, and a variety of images. I especially like the headphone girls there by Yuko Shimizu. And each chapter ends with a summary and ideas for exercises.

Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 5 comments
Tags:

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: BETTE DAVIS ACTING TECHNIQUES

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-16T08:01:55+00:00

I'm a huge Bette Davis fan, and so are lots of people in the animation industry. In view of that, it's hard to imagine why her style of acting, or anything remotely similar to it, never gets into gig studio feature animation. Our industry churns out cartloads of perky, predictable, feminist Cal Arts heroines that nobody cares about. You'd think that in all that clutter somebody would find room for a heroine based on a different model. Someone more like...well, like Bette.

I thought it might be fun to examine what that style consists of. It's a big subject, and we won't be able to cover it all in one post, but we can make a start.

Come to think of it, maybe modern actresses would have a hard time doing what Bette did, because her acting style was built around around carefully articulated speech, and not many film actors study that any more. Bette gives almost every new syllable a different facial expression.

I also love the technique (above) called "leading with your eyes," a trick used so often by Davis that it ought to be named after her.

Boy, she really fishes (above) for those those consonants. She inflates her chest and cranks her head up in order to snatch them from the air.

Davis has great cheeks (above) , that look sunny when she smiles. Sometimes she plays against type and combines happy cheeks with seedy eyes.

Sometimes she says a whole word or two with her eyes closed. Dark eyelashes and high, clearly defined eyelashes on a smooth face help the effect.

Sometimes Bette scans the person she's talking to (above) with her eyes. She carefully studies the wrinkles and buttons on the other person's shirt while they talk. This is a classic scene stealer's trick.

Talking about scene stealing, here's (above) Davis stealing a scene from Mariam Hopkins. Hopkins does a lot a lot of broad crying here, and no doubt believed she was the center of attention when the scene was shot, but the scene really belongs to Bette. She employs an attention-getting stare that vaudevillians called "the fish."

Once Davis stole a scene from another actress by unbuttoning her blouse in the shadows behind the woman. Davis played hardball, no doubt about it. Let me make it clear that I'm not criticizing her for this. She honed scene stealing into an effective style, and backed it up with virtuoso acting. I wouldn't have wanted her to change a thing.

Davis (above)must have spent a lot of time infront of a mirror, getting the character right.

She could make faces that were unique and unforgettable, like the one above. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words....

Ditto.

John K: Next

JohnK — 2010-07-16T01:04:37+00:00

How teeth shapes affect someone's specific appearance

John K: Cute Animals

JohnK — 2010-07-15T15:30:24+00:00

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: I REVIEW THE iPAD

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-15T13:33:09+00:00

A couple of days ago I visited Steve Worth and he let me play with his new, fully-loaded iPad. To say I was impressed would be an understatement. More than ever I'm convinced that this device is a true game changer, and not just an expensive toy. Buy one and you may never use your laptop again.

To begin with, this thing is FUN to use. Navigating with it is like working a video game controller. You use your thumbs a lot, and you end up moving the machine all over the place, at least I did. I'll come back to this in a minute.

The negatives? Let's see.....it was a little heavier than expected, but you get used to that. A number of important places to tap weren't marked, but you get used to that, too. The scrolling overshot a bit. I forgot to test it on a Flash film, but I watched part of Clampett's "Tortoise Wins by a Hare," and it was gorgeous. I couldn't find a still frame mode, but the paused frames were rock steady. The resolution was superb, far superior to the one on the laptop that was in the room.

The fun aspect of the device is difficult to exaggerate. Using it is an intense experience. You get a lot accomplished in a short amount of time, and have a ton of fun doing it. You have so much fun that it's a bit exhausting, and after a while you're ready to put it down and do things in the real world. Isn't that wonderful!? If you have a computer addiction, this might be the cure.

I wonder what changes this new medium will bring? Every new medium favors a new type of content. What will look horrible on iPad that currently looks good on desktops? My own blog for one thing. I hate to admit it, but this blog sucks on the new machine. It looks fine on my widescreen desktop where there's plenty of room for sidebars, but it gets clobbered on the pad. Good Grief! Am I doomed to end up on the trash heap of history!?

Oh, one more thing...just a small item, nothing important.......nothing except: SKETCHBOOK PRO IS AVAILABLE AS AN APP...AND IT COSTS ONLY EIGHT FREAKING DOLLARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And (possibly) no need to own a cintiq....with a stylus the iPad may serve as a cintiq! Can you imagine that? GOOD LORD! STEVE JOBS IS A MIRACLE WORKER!

BTW: I have no experience with the Sketchbook Pro app, so I haven't personally seen the iPad function as a cintiq. This is how it was described by an article on the net, and I pass it on to you. Buyer beware!

John K: Owen Fitzgerald Dennis Inks

JohnK — 2010-07-14T15:54:43+00:00

Ron Ferdinand sent me these nice high rez scans of original Dennis pages, so I thought I'd share 'em.

John K: Incidental Character Designs By Post

JohnK — 2010-07-13T15:09:23+00:00

As has been pointed out and acknowledged, Warren Kremer created the Harvey comics house style that the other cartoonists followed. This makes it a bit hard to tell the different artists apart. All the main characters are basically the same design. Little Audrey is Casper with ears and clothes and hair. One way to tell the different artists apart is to look at the incidental characters in the

John K: Vintage Comic Ad Copywriters

JohnK — 2010-07-13T14:59:18+00:00

It must have been a fun job to write the copy for the ads in comic books. I sometimes wonder if they knew who the audience for comic books was.Who are your favorite principal characters in Looney Tunes?Can you imagine your kids comparing their grand comic tales with each other?This copy really speaks in a vernacular every child can identify with.

Stephen Silver: Comic-Con

stephen Silver — 2010-07-12T21:14:14+00:00

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: A SHORT PLAY: "THE FRAME STORE"

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-12T06:49:04+00:00

INT. FRAME SHOP: AT THE COUNTER. A customer (BILL) talks on his cel phone while he waits for the proprietor.

BILL (ON HIS CEL PHONE): "Yeah, you're not going to believe what happened! I found the perfect frame for that piece. It's green and looks like laminated cow skin. The only problem was the price: $300! That's more than I paid for the artwork! Anyway, the clerk orders it for me, and I put half the money down.

No, wait! There's more! I walk across the street and, lo and behold, I find another store that sells the same frame for half the price. I couldn't believe it! Half the price! So I run back to the original store to get my money back, only it occurs to me that they might not want to give it to me, so I make up a story. You're going to die when you hear it! It's brilliant! It should be in the Museum of Excuse Stories. Wait a minute....here comes the guy who runs the place. I gotta go!"

He pockets the phone.

PROPRIETOR: "Hey! You just bought a frame. Don't tell me you want another one already!"

BILL: "Well, not exactly. See, what happened is...I got a parking ticket while I was in here. It's expensive, so...I hate to say it...I won't be able to buy the frame I was going to buy. I just can't afford it now."

PROPRIETOR: "Geez, that's too bad! It was a nice frame."

BILL: "Yeah. It's turning out to be one of those days."

PROPRIETOR: "How much was it for?

BILL: "How much was what for?"

PROPRIETOR: "The ticket. How much was it for?"

BILL: "Oh yeah, the ticket...it was, um...Three hundred dollars."

PROPRIETOR: "THREE HUNDRED DOLLARS!!!??" It's not supposed to be $300 here! This is Santa Monica. Two hundred and fifty is what you get for a ticket here!"

BILL: "Well, I could be mis..."

PROPRIETOR: "Let me ask my partner. DAVE, COME OUT HERE FOR A MINUTE!"

DAVE comes out with a big roll of plastic in his arms. He puts it down.

DAVE: "Bubble wrap. I'm making a place for it in the back. What can I do you for?"

PROPRIETOR: "It's not for me, it's for him. This guy just got a parking ticket for 300 bucks."

DAVE: "THREE HUNDRED BUCKS!!??? It's never three hundred in Santa Monica! It's 250! Everybody knows that! Do you know what that means?"

BILL: "Wait a minute, if you're trying to imply that I'm..."

DAVE (TO THE PROPRIETOR): "That means fifty bucks for the cop!"

PROPRIETOR: "Yep, fifty bucks! If he does 10 of those in a day, that's $500 a day."

DAVE: "$2,500 a week!"

PROPRIETOR: (on a calculator) "$125,000 a year! That's a felony!"

BILL: "Well, I..."

DAVE: "Man, I hate to hear stuff like this! It really eats at me, ya know? It just tears my guts out! One dirty cop ruins it for everybody! Santa Monica's a good town, and it deserves better than this. I'm gonna take this up with the city council!"

BILL: "Well, there's no use bothering the city councilmen..."

DAVE: "Whaddaya mean? I AM A CITY COUNCILMAN! Lemme see the ticket."

BILL: "The ticket?"

DAVE, PROPRIETOR (TOGETHER): "The ticket!"

BILL: "Well...well...er...um, the cop took it away. I just gave him a check."

PROPRIETOR: "What!!?? A check??? He took a CHECK from you???""

DAVE: "Whoa! Hold on! He's not supposed to take a check from you. He's not supposed to handle any money at all! Geeeez! This is big! The police here get federal money. That means the F.B.I.'s gonna get involved!"

PROPRIETOR: "Congress, maybe! People are gonna get sent up for this!"

He reaches for the phone.

BILL: "What are you doing!?"

PROPRIETOR: "I'm gonna call the police."

BILL (MORTIFIED): "No, no, wait!...put the phone down...just put the phone down!"

PROPRIETOR: "Wha...?"

BILL: "I um...well, I might as well just...spit it out. I, uh.... I found a place across the street that sells the same frame for half the price. You charge $300 and they charge 150 for the same thing. I... just...wanted...to........to.... get-the-money-back-so-I-could-buy-it-from-them-instead. There, I said it."

AN AWKWARD MOMENT as all three stare at the floor in silence, then....

DAVE: "I gotta put this bubble wrap away!"

DAVE EXITS.

PROPRIETOR: "Aw, that wasn't nice."

BILL: "Look, I'm really sorry. Tell you what. I'll still take the frame from you. I gave you half before, and I'll pay you the rest now. You don't have to wait til the order comes in. It's the least I can do. "

PROPRIETOR: "Alright. I'll write up a receipt......Here."

BILL: "Wait a minute! This for a hundred dollars extra. It says here that you're giving me gold wire and platinum nails. I didn't ask for that!"

PROPRIETOR (LOOKS BILL IN THE EYE): "Sure you did."

DAVE (AFTER A BEAT, RESIGNED): "(sigh!) Sure I did."

BILL, broken, exits the store. Just as he does, a nervous woman enters.

WOMAN (TO PROPRIETOR): "Um, I was in here a little while ago and ordered a frame. I hate to ask for this, but I need my down payment back. The doctor just said that my poor mother is sick. We'll need the money for medicine."

PROPRIETOR: "Gee, that's a shame. What kind of sickness does she have?"

WOMAN: "What kind? Um...er...um, rheumatism."

PROPRIETOR: "Rheumatism!!!?? Nobody throws up over rheumatism! Who is this doctor? Who did he tell you he was? Maybe he's a not a real doctor! I hate to see people get cheated! Let me ask my partner about this. DAVE, CAN YOU COME OUT HERE FOR A MINUTE!!???"

FADE OUT.

THE END

The play is copyright 2010 by Eddie Fitzgerald. Anyone can use it for non-commercial purposes without asking, as long as the authorship is attached.

the pants press sketchblog: Saint Artichoke

2010-07-11T18:06:49+00:00

10" x 10" x .25"
Watercolor and fancy papers and cake disks and gold paint and glue.

For sale on Etsy.

I documented the process over on my regular journal (EDIT: link fixed!), if you wanna see how this was made and some detail shots. Comments disabled here due to cross-posting between here and my other journal.

John K: The Picture

JohnK — 2010-07-11T17:45:54+00:00

This is the photo that inspired the first drawings of Ren.I thought it was funny to see a psychotic chihuahua in a cute sweater and I imagined him doing everything possible to get it off.I also imagined his master putting him outside where the bigger bully dogs would make fun of him.These aren't the first drawings of him, but they were based on my initial doodles. I do have some very early

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: A NEW, ONE-ACT PLAY!

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-11T08:29:01+00:00

Aaaargh! It's a tiny, miniature play written just for this blog! I started it last night and was too sleepy to finish it. I'll do the rest when I get up tomorrow (Sunday). What's it about? It's a searing drama...a cry for help, and a cry of passion. It's deeper than deep. It's all about seedy underbellies and truths never before revealed. It's lurid and lusty...full of anguish and gusto. It's ripped out of tomorrow's headlines! It's...well, see for yourself!

John K: Pre-Caucasian Rodent and Canine

JohnK — 2010-07-10T17:52:48+00:00

I wonder who decided to make Mickey flesh colored? Do you think there was a meeting where they debated it hotly? They must have thought that the new colors would be more identifiable to Arians.I like both these cartoons a lot because they look so great. ...and I love the way they move. The style is so different from how we animate today. Much more experimental and tailored to the ideas.Here's how

John K: Beautiful People 24

JohnK — 2010-07-10T01:27:55+00:00

Bolt City: Amulet 3 and Copper banners

2010-07-10T01:22:34+00:00

Here are the preview images for the Amulet 3 and Copper banners that we'll have at the Flight booth in San Diego (#2235)

Drawn!: Tack’s Cartooning Tips

Matt Forsythe — 2010-07-09T16:37:40+00:00

“TACK’S CARTOON TIPS have been pepared for the purpose of aiding those desirous of entering the field of Comic art. I have used these “Tips” in my personal instruction classes with marked success”

From a Flickr slideshow / scan of B. “Tack” Knight’s 1923 instructional book on cartooning.

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 13 comments
Tags: Cartooning, Comics, How-To, tips

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: MORE ABOUT WALLY WOOD

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-09T09:32:05+00:00

Remember this picture (above)? I put it up a week ago to illustrate the point that Wally Wood certainly loved his Ikea furniture. I kinda like it too. Thanks to Ikea, anybody can have a 50s bachelor pad at a reasonable price.

Anyway, I thought the picture above deserved a second look. It reminds me that the young and struggling Wood was probably pretty dependant on his magazine reference. Before he worked on Mad, Wood shared an office with realistic artists Frazetta and Williamson, and was under a lot of pressure to improve his realistic drawing quickly.

For interior backgrounds Wood seemed to prefer reference that that emphasized perspective and the blocky nature of furniture. My guess is that he chose these because he was insecure about his use of perspective and found the clarity and simplicity of these mathematical pictures to be helpful.

I like to think that somewhere along the line it dawned on him that the simple perspectives he was using were funny. Maybe he began to laugh at his own pictures. Maybe after a point he decided that competing with Williamson and Frazetta for realism was pointless, and he broke out into pure style.

You could argue that his handling of human characters evolved the same way. At first Wood relied heavily on magazine reference. The girl above strikes a fashion magazine pose when she points her gun. Look at her legs and feet. That's an odd way to stand when you're supposed to be in the throws of murderous passion.

Eventually Wood would transcend this too obvious use of reference, but a lot of people believe he did uniquely interesting work in this period, when he had a foot in both worlds, and was making a transition to something more stylized. The reference anchored him, made his work more complex. The space patrol girl is funny in her model pose, but she's also dignified, confident, and iconic. Her contradictions make her a puzzle that we enjoy trying to solve. And it all takes place in a bizarre bachelor pad full of obsessively blocky shapes.

Could this (above) have been the magazine ad that Wood referenced? The legs are the same, so is the hair style...sort of. The model's also off balance, just like the space girl in Wood's picture.

Anyway, this is what I'm arguing here: that first out of necessity, then by choice, Wood thrust Pepsi Generation models into outer space to encounter hideous monsters.

John K: Beautiful People 23

JohnK — 2010-07-09T05:30:42+00:00

Remind me to tell you my stories about hanging out with Michael sometime.

John K: Some Of The Greatest

JohnK — 2010-07-09T00:25:37+00:00

John K: Beautiful People 22

JohnK — 2010-07-08T17:22:56+00:00

I'm fascinated by this girl's head. There are so many interesting departures from the ideal generic head shape that I'm having trouble figuring out which feature to focus on.Every time I do something to one, it knocks another out of place.It seems like there is a black hole in the center of her face that is sucking all the features towards the middle. That is very hard for me to capture.I still

John K: Yogi's Ground Game

JohnK — 2010-07-08T03:20:09+00:00

From 1997, an early tribute I did in honor of the UFC.When I first turned in this scene to CN, they wanted me to cut it because they thought Yogi and Ranger Smith were having "relations". I explained that, no, this was an MMA style of fighting popularized by first, Royce Gracie's Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and then built upon by Mark "the Hammer" Coleman's "Ground and Pound" combination of wrestling

John K: UFC 116 Tonight! Lesnar VS Carwin

JohnK — 2010-07-07T20:02:18+00:00

http://116.ufc.com/Ultimate Fighting Championship MY UFC COMMERCIAL WHEN IT WAS BANNED FROM CABLEwatch the big boys crash skulls!MORE UFC STARS!

John K: Dreamboats

JohnK — 2010-07-07T12:16:08+00:00

John K: Gnarly Tree Shafts

JohnK — 2010-07-06T21:10:16+00:00

Here is the dissected anatomy of a tree shaft - it's made of subordinate tubes that cling together to make the bigger form.Here are some good and rude trees to practice hierarchy on.2 CONTRASTING URGES MAKE THE TREE'S FORMHere the sub tubes are wrenched apart. The feeling I get from the form of trees is that they are constructed out of opposing forces. One major force is trying to hold all the

John K: Howie Post Trees, Cottages and Outdoor Scenes

JohnK — 2010-07-06T17:47:55+00:00

Howie's details - like the leaves and bark on the trees are swell, but they are subservient to the larger shapes in the composition. Post makes sure he arranges the biggest shapes in relationship to each other first: Tree, sky house, character, ground - all these balance really nicely against each other. Once he has that balance, he wraps the details around the larger shapes.In that big fat solid

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WARD & BETTY KIMBALL

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-06T16:57:35+00:00

I was about to post something else when I discovered these pictures of the young Ward Kimball and his wife Betty on Cartoon Brew. I immediately put my own post aside, so I could put these up instead. They're just too good to get anything less than the widest possible attention.

As I said, the picture above is of animator Ward Kimball and his wife Betty. Betty recently died at age 97. I don't know if I've ever seen a photo which so perfectly conveys young love. The two seem so right for each other, so serene in each other's company. If Eisenstadt or some other famous photographer had taken it, it would find its way onto the walls of a major museum. Since it's a personal, family photo I don't know what its fate will be.

Above, a beautiful sketch, which also conveys the feeling the two had for each other. What a powerful medium pencil and paper is when it's in the right hands!

Ward did this sketch (above) of Betty sleeping. Very nice! I wish I could have met her when she was alive! I'm glad the two had each other.

Thanks to Amid for putting up the pictures I swiped. You can see the whole set at Cartoon Brew, July 4th entry:

http://www.cartoonbrew.com

Drawn!: Bryan Lee O’Malley and Scott Pilgrim Page Flow

John Martz — 2010-07-06T14:43:26+00:00

Over on his Flickr account, Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley shares an interesting look at how the flow of panels his comics has improved from earlier volumes.

Take this page from Book 3:

And compare to one from Book 5:

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: Bryan Lee O'Malley, Comics, Scott Pilgrim

John K: Swipe File : House Interiors, Howie Post

JohnK — 2010-07-06T03:13:40+00:00

Drawn!: Ginette Lapalme

John Martz — 2010-07-05T22:52:08+00:00

I stumbled onto Ginette Lapalme’s Flickr account by way of Michael DeForge on Twitter. I love the playful experimental nature of these watercolour sketches.

Even more, I love these painted sticks:

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Ginette Lapalme, Illustration, watercolour

John K: Swipe File: Howie Post Exteriors

JohnK — 2010-07-05T18:21:46+00:00

A lot of artists keep "swipe files" for reference. Kirby and Wood used to talk about it. No one knows what everything looks like and an organized swipe file of photos and other artists' interpretations of things is handy reference.I am not good at drawing backgrounds or coming up with interesting camera angles. Howie Post is a great reference for me. He has already done all the work of studying

Drawn!: Brian Taylor’s Bumtown Bruiser

John Martz — 2010-07-05T18:01:09+00:00

Yes! Brian Taylor has released the last in his series of six letterpress prints, Bumtown Bruiser. The universe of Brian’s Candykiller universe is one born out of 1920’s Fleischer animation, EC horror comics, and everything in-between.

Here’s the full set of prints:

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: brian taylor, prints

John K: Beautiful People 21

JohnK — 2010-07-04T20:00:01+00:00

John K: Happy 4th

JohnK — 2010-07-04T17:55:19+00:00

Ron Ferdinand sent me this beautiful page celebrating freedom's birthday.

John K: Toys VS Humans

JohnK — 2010-07-04T17:19:15+00:00

Boy, drawing 3 dimensional cartoon toys is enough of a challenge. People ask me all the time whether I think life drawing is useful to cartoonists and animators and my answer is a hesitant - yes. Under certain conditions.the shapes in real life are so much more intricate than 2 dimensional cartoon characters that the gap between the 2 is immense. It's very hard to bridge the 2 disciplines in

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: IT'S JULY FOURTH!!!!!

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-04T17:19:13+00:00

This (above) is a short video I made a couple of years ago to express what I felt about the Fourth of July. I considered remaking it, but after watching it again I concluded that I'm not likely to improve on it, so here it is, in all its 2008 glory.

While I'm at it, I'll throw in this nifty opening title from HBO's John Adams series.

Last, but not least, here's (above) a brief excerpt from that series where John Adams publicly commits to the ideal of liberty. I always get misty-eyed over stuff like this.

Have a good Fourth everybody!

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: RECENT ASTRONOMICAL PICTURES

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-07-04T17:01:38+00:00

More terrific photos from the Cassini orbiter! I still can't believe that it's possible to see the surface of a moon circling far away Saturn. Here's (above) a giant crater on Mimas. Be sure to click to enlarge all of the photos in this post.

Above, another moon of Saturn, a small one called Phoebe. Maybe it's a captured comet.

No doubt everybody here is familiar with the Horsehead Nebula. I thought you'd like to see it in context, framed by a ring of gas. The horsehead is the backlit, little chess piece in the upper middle of the picture.

This (above) is M66, one of the closest galaxies. It's a lot more impressive when seen large.

This is a detail of the edge of a another nearby galaxy. Enlargement is a must.

Above, the Rosette Nebula.

Above, the stunningly beautiful Great Nebula in Orion.

The Itokawa Asteroid...and it has no craters! What gives!? It must have been recently formed. And what are all those pimple boulders doing there?

John K: Ron Ferdinand Interview 1

JohnK — 2010-07-03T17:13:38+00:00

http://www.dennisthemenace.com/ronferdinand.htmlRon Ferdinand has been drawing Hank Ketcham's Dennis sunday pages for years and I asked him he would be willing to share some memories and their working process.001 I had taken the family to Disneyland and this was on my drawing table when I returned to work.a) Working with KetchamWhen did you first start working for Ketcham and what were the

John K: Beautiful People 20

JohnK — 2010-07-03T16:10:31+00:00

John K: Kirby Studies

JohnK — 2010-07-02T21:14:18+00:00

John K: What Disney Did Best

JohnK — 2010-07-02T18:09:03+00:00

I like the look of this transitional period of Disney's. It's between the pure rubber hose cartoons of the early 30s and the feature style that eventually abandoned early cartoon sensibility altogether.Disney was still taking advantage of cartoony motion in this period. The design of the characters was changing slightly to accommodate the new techniques of motion that the animators were

John K: What Disney Did Best 2: Atmosphere

JohnK — 2010-07-02T16:33:25+00:00

Color, layout, scene planning, camerawork, special effects and music - and more important than any of those individual elements is the hierarchical coordination of them all.the cutesy character stuff kind of gets in the way of the atmosphere, but I guess you gotta put something in there for the Moms and pantywaists in the audience.My favorite parts of classic Disney movies are the sequences that

John K: Regular People Instead Of Models

JohnK — 2010-07-02T02:30:43+00:00

It's easier to caricature someone who isn't a professional model.Trying to figure out how the body works under all those lumpy clothes is a problem.More lumpy clothes but a good head to draw.These caricatures are still conservative because I am drawing the people for the first time and only from one angle.Whoops, I see I got lazy and drew at an angle instead of looking straight at the paper.

John K: More Hair

JohnK — 2010-07-01T22:00:02+00:00

Warm up 1: Bland slow Filmation style realistic study.2: Still stiff, but the drawing on the right is starting to loosen up3: 1st drawing to begin to approach what I am striving for4: Starting to get there, but I see lots of mistakes when I compare the drawings to the photos this wayDrawing real humans is a lot harder than drawing cartoon characters out of simple shapes (like that's not obvious)

Drawn!: Weeklies by Tom Gauld

David Huyck — 2010-06-30T23:57:11+00:00

While his Guardian strip is on hiatus, Tom Gauld is doing a weekly comic over on Flickr. Fantastic news!

Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: comic, Tom Gauld

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: WHERE DID THE 60S COME FROM?

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-06-30T17:51:43+00:00

"What led to the 60's?" you ask. Good question. Well, there's Vietnam, the pill, drugs, civil rights...you name it. These are the standard explanations, and they're all important, but we all know there's gotta be more than that. You don't go from Ozzie and Harriet to bare-breasted at Woodstock in just a few years unless you have a lot of history pushing at your back.

What that history is, I don't know. I thought I might free-associate a little here, just to see what other explanations I could come up with. I've tried this before and what I came up with was woefully inadequate, but maybe I'll do better this time. Here goes.......

Well, there was TV. In the 50s and early 60s adults hadn't become addicted to it yet, but kids watched a ton of it. Most of the dramas were clear-cut, good guy vs. bad guy stuff. The situation comedies and H&B cartoons were mind-numbingly stupid. My guess is that TV kids of this era...the future hippies... grew up idealistic under the influence of the dramas, but filled with a revulsion for ordinary life the way it was portrayed on the sitcoms.

Then there was the fact that lots of late 50s kids had allowances, something only rich kids had in the 19th Century. With money to spend they developed a youth culture built around the things they liked to buy, like records.

Talking about the 19th century, let me digress for a minute to take note of the Romanticism of that era, with its emphasis on the mysterious workings of the inner mind. That idea spilled over into the 20th Century, carried there by people like Freud and Ibsen and the Surrealists. Marxism was carried over too, only it was modified by the romantics who absorbed it and gave it a different flavor.

One result of the Marxist-Romantic synthesis was fascism. For decades central Europeans lived under fascist or communist governments which which portrayed America in the worst light possible. Amazingly, a lot of pre-hippies picked up on this view of ourselves and believed it.

That's the young Paul Newman (above) at the Actors' Studio in New York. Ibsen's theories, which emphasized character conflict and the need to bring the mysterious inner life to the surface, ruled at that studio.

Stories favored by this school were always about sensitive people who were damaged or made insane by the irrational demands of normal society. That seems like an odd theme to dwell on exclusively, but actors liked these stories because they were full of emotional fireworks, and seemed kind of edgy because normal society was always the villain.

If you lived at that time, and were destined to be a hippie, you saw and read a LOT of stories where normal people were the bad guys.

One of the most influential people of the early 60s was Alvin Toffler, who's almost forgotten now. He wrote futurist books which predicted a right-around-the-corner society where machines made possible a twenty hour work week and an overabundance of cheap food and material possessions. Our only problem would be what to do with the spare time.

Toffler's important because an awful, awful lot of people...including future hippies... believed what he said, and concluded that...Damn!...if unlimited wealth was right around the corner, then we should loose the work ethic, have a party, and redistribute everything. With so much to go around, it would be positively stingy to do anything else.

Toffler's book sold big in cheap paperbacks, which was the only kind of book most young people could afford to buy. The innovative publishers who pioneered the paperback revolution were mostly left-inclined, so the books that young people read were usually limited to that point of view (Salinger isn't overtly left in this book, I just liked the picture).

Hmmmm.....anything else? No, I guess that's it.

In spite of all I just said I don't think Romanticism, left-leaning records, paperbacks and movies, or any of the standard explanations really add up to what we saw in the 60s. I told you I didn't understand where the 60s came from, and I don't.

Maybe there was something else, something more off the wall. Maybe miniskirts (above) were to blame. I mean, they make a powerful visual argument for the rightness of something or other.

Maybe after the miniskirt there was no turning back. No matter how destructive the new sensibility might turn out to be, a return to the society that covered up legs was unthinkable.

No wonder the hippie philosophy spread so fast. Imagine that you were a file clerk in an insurance company in 1964, and had an abusive boss. There he is behind you telling you what a good-for-nothing you are, and your eyes happen to wander over to the poster above, which is on the wall. How inviting it would be to drop everything and follow the girl with the guitar!

John K: Illustration and Cartooning

JohnK — 2010-06-30T16:28:49+00:00

It's hard to believe how high the standards in popular arts were just a few decades ago.Top Tier CartooningGreat IllustrationSomeone Who Can Do BothA Hilarious CombinationGreat Cartooning, Draftsmanship and Design CombinedThese all came from one generous blogger.http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/

Drawn!: Finger painting on the iPad

John Martz — 2010-06-30T15:03:20+00:00

Watch in awe as David Kassan paints with an iPad.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 14 comments
Tags: iPad

John K: More Hair : Asian Girls

JohnK — 2010-06-29T19:16:53+00:00

My "realistic" drawings are about as bland as bland can be. I'm ready for when Filmation starts up again. My goal is not to learn to draw realistically, but to understand why things look a certain way in general logical terms so I can then simplify and cartoon them.I gave myself a double problem with these studies. I want to add some hairstyles to my pretty girl palette and am using a Japanese

Drawn!: Squeal Like a Pig! (And Draw Like One, Too!)

Patricia Storms — 2010-06-29T17:14:42+00:00

What started off as a fun drawing challenge between artists Stacy Curtis and Guy Francis has now become a very popular creative blog where other illustrators are now encouraged to take part in the Dueling Banjo Pigs Project. Artists like Ted Dawson, Dan Thompson, Rick Kirkman, Mike Lester, Mike Lynch, and Paula J. Becker have all contributed delightful piggy illustrations.

So get in on the piggy banjo act and send in your drawing, too! Sqeeeeeee!!

Posted by Patricia Storms on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags:

Drawn!: Cloudy Collection: Volume II, Edition 2

David Huyck — 2010-06-29T16:05:16+00:00

There’s too much news lately about disasters – it’s time to celebrate perseverance and the ability to be fruitful and multiply! These eight (yes: seven plus one!) letterpress prints feature art about gathering, joining together, and swarms! Also: teaming up – each of the prints in the newest set from the Cloudy Collection was designed by an amazing artist duo! Teeming Up! includes art by Aesthetic Apparatus, Always With Honor, Eight Hour Day, Ghostshrimp + Pendleton Ward, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Lab Partners, Sonnenzimmer, and Becky & Frank. .

Eight prints for $35? You’re welcome.

Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Aesthetic Apparatus, Always With Honor, Becky & Frank, Cloudy Collection, Eight Hour Day, Ghostshrimp, Lab Partners, letterpress, Pen Ward, prints, Sonnenzimmer, The Little Friends of Printmaking

John K: Larry MacDougall

JohnK — 2010-06-29T15:00:40+00:00

Here's some excellent "illustrative art" to contrast with all the great cartoony art I admire.I don't know who this is exactly. I just stumbled on his work through links at commenters' blogs.I love his compositions, his poses, his design sense - and especially his trees. He has a nice combination of style and observation.I'd say this is draftsmanship on a much higher level than what most

Uncle Eddie's Theory Corner!: MORE OBSERVATIONS ABOUT WOMEN (RE-WRITTEN)

Eddie Fitzgerald — 2010-06-29T06:07:03+00:00

WARNING: Nothing obscene here, but this post is not office or school safe.

In the era of the dinosaurs (above), most young women ran around naked. That's okay. I'm sure nobody complained. In those days, even middle-aged women were probably pretty slim and athletic.

Not so for modern city women (above). They tend to put on weight pretty early in life. So do modern men, but this post isn't about them.

Most modern women will eventually develop a pear shape, like Rembrandt's wife in the drawing above.

Instead of developing a gut like middle-aged men do, they develop a thickening of the entire middle of the body. Oddly, the upper torso remains relatively thin, at least for a while.

Why is this so interesting? Because this shape puts enormous emphasis on the the genital region...it makes it the unmistakable center of interest. The whole body becomes a wide, diamond-shaped target with a huge patch of pubic hair in the center. When you consider that women reach their sexual peak at the same age they take this shape, then the only conclusion to draw is that nature desperately wants to advertise women's sexuality at this age. Why? I don't know.

After a bit the upper torso expands as well, creating a sort of vertical barbell shape. This (above) is a pretty extreme example, but you know what I mean. The genital region is no longer the center of interest, though sex characteristics are still obvious until old age sets in.

I forgot to say that after the hips and thighs begin to expand, the abdomen begins to stretch out (above). Within reason that's sexy, at least I think so. Boy, nature desperately wants women to stay sexy, even in the 30 - 45 year old range. Maybe older. Nothing subtle here. When the blush of youth wears off, nature rolls up its sleeves and resorts to the hard sell, hawking a woman's sex potential with a bullhorn and billboards. Interesting, huh?

Aren't you glad you read Theory Corner? What other art site is so doggoned scientific?

BTW: I'm aware that dinosaurs and humans never existed at the same time.

Drawn!: Horst J. Bernhart: SKYplay

John Martz — 2010-06-29T00:53:13+00:00

SKYplay is a photoset that takes spotting shapes in clouds to the next level. These playful and creative photos are the work of Horst J. Bernhart who passed away in May this year.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 3 comments
Tags: Creative Thinking, Photography

Drawn!: Kunz & Vellekoop: Naughty in Toronto, June 30

Luc Latulippe — 2010-06-28T22:20:12+00:00

So, this is really four pieces of news all in one post. First, Maurice Vellekoop finally has a website! He’s one of my all-time favourites, and I’m delighted to see he finally has a presence online (it’s probably hearsay, but a friend of a friend of a friend of Maurice’s once told me several years ago he wasn’t fond of the internet and had resisted having a site. See, now I’m just spreading rumours! Don’t repeat a word of this!).

Second: he’s also started a blog this year. Don’t miss this scans of the Polaroids he took when covering an event for Vogue back in 1994.

Third (seemingly unrelated, but stick with me): Anita Kunz, another favourite illustrator, also started a blog two years ago, and embarrassed to say I’m just finding it now.

But wait, it gets better! Anita and Maurice are having an art show together in Toronto in two days! TWO DAYS FROM TODAY! It’s killing me to know that I will miss this. Mind you, if I did attend and managed to work up the nerve to speak to either of them, I’d doubtless blurt out something idiotic, alienate myself as a weirdo fanboy, and possibly spill wine on them.

It’s called The Naughty Show (personally, I’d have pushed for VelleKunz, but that’s just me) and will feature over a hundred nudes by Kunz, and originals from Vellekoop’s newest pinup book.

Details for you lucky folks who can make it:
ONE800 Gallery, 800 Dundas Street West, Toronto — June 30: 7:00 – 9:00

Posted by Luc Latulippe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: anita kunz, art show, Events, Illustration, Maurice Vellekoop, toronto

John K: Jim Tyer Likes You

JohnK — 2010-06-28T17:35:05+00:00

Boy, talk about "Man Cartoonists". Jim Tyer is the definition of one. This guy had the power to shoot his pure funny thoughts straight from his brain through his pencil to hit the paper unfiltered by preconceived rules, model sheets or second-guessing. He just drew what he felt - and he felt that kids deserved fun.That's kind of how I draw storyboards, but I always intend to "fix" things later in

John K: Next

JohnK — 2010-06-28T16:44:49+00:00

Jim Tyer is every kid's best friend...you'll see.

Drawn!: The Printer’s Handbook

John Martz — 2010-06-28T16:12:38+00:00

I have a real soft spot for old printing and type specimen books, so I adore the beautiful scans over at BibliOdyssey of a German printer’s book called Schrift- und Polytypen-Proben (Fonts and examples of different type).

Follow the trail of links and you’ll discover a treasure of type, engravings, and flourishes to inspire your next ornamental illustration project.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Design, ephemera, Typography

Drawn!: Scampd: contemporary advertising illustration

John Martz — 2010-06-28T16:06:57+00:00

Scampd is a new blog/showcase devoted to celebrating contemporary advertising illustration. From the site:

For a time, we silently bore witness as advertising award shows and design annuals killed off their once glorious illustration categories. But enough is enough, and we have decided to do something about it.

Illustrators, art directors, and agencies are invited to submit their work to be featured.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: advertising, Illustration

John K: Trying To Give Back

JohnK — 2010-06-27T17:46:27+00:00

More stiff caricaturesThese hotties would surely make Disney fans swoon in cartoon form.That Taylor girl really does have an interesting head, but I haven't quite nabbed it yet. It might be too unique for animation, though.Since anmated fairytales are in dire need of new designs for the lead romantic characters I thought I'd work on some. I am basing them on live action celebrities with proven

Drawn!: Pixel-illustrators eBoy have an iPhone game

Matt Forsythe — 2010-06-26T22:40:03+00:00

The pixel-kings of isometry, eBoy have released this tilting iPhone game. You can try the game on this site if you don’t have an iPhone or any of that other hardware.

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: eboy, games, iphone, Pixel Art

Drawn!: Walt Kelly’s Pogo and the Jabberwocky

John Martz — 2010-06-26T22:24:29+00:00

So great. Plucked from an old Pogo comic book, here’s Walt Kelly’s Albert Alligator reciting Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Comics, Lewis Carroll, Walt Kelly

John K: Watch Fedor Kick Ass Saturday Night

JohnK — 2010-06-26T17:32:05+00:00

It's on Showtime (or one of your sports channels) for only $25.If you haven't seen Fedor yet, you're in for a treat! He is a fighter/scientist with no emotion. He just analyzes his opponent while taking a few punches and kicks and then he destroys him with efficiency.Support manliness!Fedor's Cartoon Drawings:

John K: Leftover Treats

JohnK — 2010-06-26T17:00:18+00:00

In my insatiable search for illustrations for my posts, I often find images that I'm dying to share but haven't yet found room in a particular post for.Here are some of these magnificent treasures that speak more than words could say...UNDERWEAR GOD: "I better go arrest that lady for indecent exposure! I don't care if she is the first girl the Lord made. I'M the new God around here!"You can