Friday, June 30, 2017

IT'S A THING!

http://cccaarrttoonist.blogspot.com.au/
Every 'CARTOONIST' strip, plus added bits 'n pieces.

This is a thing...

Will be posting ALL the cartoonist strips in one blog....soon

Thursday, June 1, 2017

The Making of a Yew Norker

Haven’t done one of these ‘how I make stuff’ posts, but someone was asking about the Yew Norker cartoons and its abit different to the way I usually do printed comics. I’ve done 4 panel strips specifically ‘Cartoonist’ which taught me how to get across an idea in a minimum number of panels. I learnt the basic introduction/ premise/ punchline storyline. So, I wanted to try doing single panel comics as I was not something I had tackled before. For years I’d been looking at single panel comics from big New Yorker, Punch & Esquire books. It came apparent to me that one of the themes seem to be white privilege type problems, particularly in New Yorker cartoons. So, I used that as a theme, but tried to make them more extreme rather than twee. Though if you look at New Yorker cartoons these day they’re pretty good! 


Annoying idiot- ‘Where do you get ideas from?’ From a big blank book and a biro in my house. Whenever I have an idea for anything I quickly grab this and scribble the idea down. I’ve gotten into the habit of carrying a pen and paper to write ideas down anywhere I am, as typing on a phone takes too long for me.



I wanted to make the process quicker than my usual sitting at my drawing board table process. I pencil sketch the idea in an A4 sketchbook with my handy-dandy drawing board, which is a slab of particle board found in hard rubbish!


I ink with a lamy fountain pen, I do simple line work with little crosshatching, so it’s usually a quick process. In the past, I’ve used roting tech pens, but they clog, the ink runs erratically and they’re hard to fill. Now they gather dust.




Its then time to scan. I got a decent flatbed scanner for artwork that sits on my scanner/printer. I scan a 600 tif file because I want to print these panels in a book later.

I put the tif in Photoshop to do the greys. Ink wash would be fun, but Photoshop is quicker and I’m able to fix any problems quickly. Really, it’s a matter of picking different hues if the drawing is complicated, if the drawing is simple I stick to the one tone of grey.

I usually wouldn’t use computer type, but in this case it works for the overall  theme of the work.