A logo for a record company. (Actually a CD & music publishing company...but like most of their kind, they call themselves a record company.)(...despite no longer making any "records".)

Whacked

A national publication for the automotive industry just hired me to do a weekly "editorial cartoon" ...and being a car enthusiast, I jumped at the chance.

They wanted the first cartoon to center around Honda's decision last week to kill off the Accord Hybrid model, (http://www.sacbee.com/103/story/219149.html), after lackluster sales. (My opinion is that people who like to think "green" are not likely want a car that can do 0-60 in under six seconds...with decent but not great gas mileage. They want to be seen helping the environment and the Toyota Prius, with its odd shape, broadcasts it a lot more.)

The Sopranos ended its long, fabulous run on HBO this week, too. You never know what will happen when you throw two unrelated subjects into a blender but this time it seemed to work okay.

School's out

As Alice Cooper crooned, SCHOOL'S OUT!

School is not out everywhere, but it soon will be.
My daughter's last day of school was yesterday and she is both excited and a bit melancholy to be finished with first grade. (My wife and I can relate...as today Julia's bedroom has been transformed into a stuffed animal hospital, with dozens of stuffed animals lined up for "treatment". Band aids, thermometers, and gauze pads are in heavy supply. We hesitate to guess what messy activity will be happening later today.)

During the school year, I illustrate a weekly children's feature for a publication distributed to elementary schools. (The Current Events, New York) It has been a fun diversion and also something that my daughter enjoys reading. (She even helps with occasional logistical decisions about what a kid's room might look like, etc.) The above installment ran in this week's issue...and will be the last for this school year before resuming again in the fall.

Ebay Healthcare

The above cartoons were comissioned by a medical equipment company in California, to fight new legislation proposed for Medicare. The bill would require all medical suppliers to bid on patients, auction-style. The net effect would be a lower prices for patients, (sounds good--at first), but also a limited number of companies can win the bids...so it would also allow those companies to win bids by selling used and possibly substandard equipment.

Lastly, the equipment would no longer be required to be covered by any warranties. So when it breaks, the patients, (mostly elderly) would be stuck trying to find someone repair it. We're talking about oxygen tanks, regulators and wheelchairs...items that can be dangerous if left in a state of disrepair.

The first cartoon has appeared in a few magazines and newspapers, garnering some attention for the issue...the second one (the ebay theme) will run soon.

I have several friends who are editorial cartoonists, (which is my background), and they get to do things like this all the time. I enjoy my work a great deal....but I have days where I feel like I've done nothing worthwhile, so it's extra enjoyable to draw something that may also do some good.

Night and Day

Well, this week has been busy, finding me working night and day. (And that explains the gap in blog posts.)

Speaking of the juxtaposition of day and night, I thought I'd post a bit of artwork I was commissioned to do for a CD, (for a Las Vegas-based band.) This was for their new album called "Between the Sun and the Moon".) On the other side of the CD will be a photo of the band in a convertible that is stopped on the side of the road. The bass player is on the phone trying to call for help on his cell phone...presumably he's talking to the moon.

Unsinkable?

This is a cartoon I recently created for a financial services company in New York. The company president had been dissatisfied with humorous print campaign ideas coming from their ad agency and decided to go in a different direction...with cartoons.

Apparently it worked, and so, this is the first of a series of cartoon ads.

(BTW, no, that is not Leonardo Dicaprio on the bow of the ship.) (I tried to get him for this, but he was busy doing a seminar on Global Warming.)

Let it out

A corporate client in California commissioned me to do a series of cartoons for their company website and a 'caption contest' for their customer base. I love working on things like that because there are no parameters for subject matter or scenarios. I get to just open the creative valve and see what comes out...

This particular cartoon came to mind this morning as an old friend called and vented about a relationship. I tried my best to listen and offer advice...but after a while I felt like I needed to vent, too.

So, Phhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaa!!! (I feel much better now. Thanks for listening.)

Have a hankering for a hunk of Brie cheese?

The above title hearkens back to the old SchoolHouse Rock animated shorts on Saturday morning tv. ("Conjunction Junction", etc.) But as it nears lunch time here, I'm wishing I had a way to get a quick gourmet meal, with no big time investment and not much expense.

Here's a cartoon, (done for client & friend, Brad Shorr), that shows just such a place. I can almost see somebody franchising a place like that. (It would go well until the first customer sued because they gagged on a diamond pin in their lobster-artichoke panini.)

Red, red wine

This is a cartoon I created for K&L winery (in Northern California) last month. 

Their ad agency was doing a campaign that showed an open copy of a New Yorker-like magazine with a "New Yorker" style cartoon...and obviously, they could not simply publish a photo of the actual magazine without violating copyrights. Additionally, they wanted the cartoon to be specifically about wine and also mention their winery in the background.

So, they hired a San Francisco design firm to create the magazine layout, and they hired me to write and draw the "New Yorker" cartoon. 

I wrote three concepts and we all agreed that this one fit, so I create the artwork. After the winery's approval, the SF design firm placed it into the design. Lots of fun, and I enjoyed getting to see the ad in a few magazines this month.

-----------

Two book illustration jobs are on the drawing board, and I'm going to do my best to get ahead with them so that I can take a motorcycle trip into the mountains, now that the snow is clear from most of the roads at high altitude. I'm going with a friend who is in town for a few days.

Here's an old pic from a motorcycle trip taken with that friend, and another buddy. We rode from Boulder to Kansas City to see a White Sox/Royals game...and to Lawrence Kansas, (where my girlfriend at the time was pursuing postgraduate degrees in Education at KU). A great trip, with lots of memories...but I'll be honest, one of them involved that return trip, which we blitzed through at a fast pace to beat a storm. The last couple hundred miles on the motorcycles left our heinies as tender as Kansas City BBQ.

 

 

Back in "town"

Ahem. Well, please accept my apologies for the set-up -- and then the big drop-off. It has been a crazy few months with business, (which is terrific)...and also over the past several months, we endured a family illness and loss, (my wife's mom was diagnosed with colon cancer and recently passed away)...which hit us very hard.

After settling back into a semblance of normal routine, I now see that the idea of maintaining both personal and business blogs is too much to even dream about. Thus, I will just maintain this blog formerly called "Toon Town" and now renamed "Dancing Moose", encompassing all cartooning subject matter, personal and professional.

Hope all is well on your end.

Cheers,

Mark

Old memories from the hard drive

Watch your step

Time zones

Ideas for extra income

Bad hair day

Say that again?

Where's my comb?

Dusting off the old...er, new airbrush

This is some art I was asked to create for a new website, (run by the syndicate that distributes my comics). It was a little different in style than my usual cartoons and it required the use of shading and highlighting. I'm not sure whether I really like the finished product or not, to be honest.

But I thought I'd post it for another reason; to discuss the creation process.

In the old days this sort of thing required an airbrush and lots of paint changes...and worst of all, a few days of time. Fortunately, Photoshop allows one to do very similar things with just a drawing tablet and a perhaps an hour or two of time... (No messy overspray, masking tape and paint spills to clean-up, either.)

Sunscreen?

This never actually happened to me, but it's a glimpse of what it was like growing up with my Dad. And now that I think about it, when I was very young, sunscreen wasn't in vogue. It was suntan lotion/tannning butter/oil. We had a good supply of Hawaiian Tropic Super Professional oil in our house. The label suggested that "professional tanners" (I dare you to try entering that occupation on a tax form), used it exclusively. Being that pro sun tanning is about as safe as working in a coal mine, I wonder how many of these pro tannners are alive today...

Oktoberfest approacheth

Summer is bordered by Spring and Fall...by Memorial and Labor Day...and by Cinco De Mayo and Oktoberfest.

I like the food elements of those last two festivities very much. (I can still taste the large steins of full-bodied beer and freshly-roasted chicken at Oktoberfest in Munich from a trip there over ten years ago.) There's no need to talk about how good food at Cinco De Mayo celebration can be. Once, I mixed German beer with Mexican food. Seemed like a good idea at the time...

Original Art

This card was created for a client and it fits today's subject because I didn't simply email the card art to him. I printed the card on heavy card stock and mailed it to him. (Not an uncommon request...but it happens less often these days.)

Yesterday, after blathering on here about how changes in technology have affected the drawing of cartoons, I became nostalgic for the days of old. (A time stretching from the era of "golden age" cartoons to not very long ago.) There were no digital files, just ink, pencil and possibly some paint on paper. It was simple and seemed closer to real art back then.

Does an emailed series of 1's and 0's, digitized from a scan of Charles Schulz's Peanuts have anywhere near the same inspirational ability as a large piece of bristol that he personally splashed with jet black india ink? I say nay.

Most cartoonists draw digitally now. So does original art even exist anymore? Increasingly, it only exists if a client asks for it.

In my case, (where we're not talking about collectible art, like that of Schulz's), some clients simply want a large piece of art for their homes or offices, so a nicely printed copy will do. With some of the new types of printers with 'solid' or laser-bonded inks, you can provide a long-lasting, almost archival print.

Some clients however, are more discerning. They want an actual drawing, with the sketches in blue pencil or graphite visible in areas, and also the look and feel of the ink on the bristol board. They are willing to pay more for it and they honestly appreciate the art itself when it is done.

Despite my regular use and high appreciation of digital tablets, I agree with some of this thinking. Looking at an original piece of art -- especially one created by another cartoonist -- is fascinating. Because of this, I have some originals from some of my idols and I go to see cartoon art on exhibition. You can see some of the writing and drawing process. There are wording changes or whited-out areas...you see the abandonment of one position or facial expression for a better one. It's a lesson almost as good as sitting right next to the cartoonist at the time of creation.

The evolution of craft

This is my Dad, to a "T". Seriously. He hates computers and the Internet.

I just had a brief discussion about new technology with a fellow cartoonist, (Mark Anderson), and we introduced each other to new gizmos/tools, (or write-offs). So, I thought I'd expand on that subject here and detail how the "craft" of cartooning has changed with technology.

I used to be a purist, with all my work done in india ink on paper. But with client deadlines overwhelming at times, I decided to try a digital drawing tablet for inking over my scanned sketches in Photoshop...and later, after becoming more comfortable with the hand-eye coordination differences, sometimes sketching into Photoshop, with no scanning.

I traded my first tablet in for a Wacom Intuous 3 a couple years ago, when it debuted on the market. The main innovation over the well-liked Intuos 2 is that you can program the buttons and touch strips to zoom in and out, increase/decrease your brush/eraser diameter...and also handle functions like switching among brush types & paint bucket, and stepping backward and forward in time with your non-drawing hand. It all becomes a big time saver, in addition to the time and materials saved by drawing digitally.

Recently I've been drawing some things without sketches, because with quick steps back in time possible, every stray stroke can be removed easier than erasing. It's scary in a way how the process has evolved for many cartoonists, (as well as animators and illustrators.) Still, if a client wants frameable, original art, then I break out the india ink and bristol -- and happily oblige them.

The other half of cartooning, the ideas, (the more important half, I think), hasn't evolved at all with technology. The only innovation worth mentioning is Microsoft Word...and it isn't much help in actually finding the spark of humor or cleverness needed to fuel a good cartoon.

Back from vacation...

My apologies for the lengthy time between posts. I was on vacation for a week and for a week or two prior to that, found myself swamped with client work and staying up until 2 AM most nights to meet deadlines...

But I will do my best to make up for it and post regularly this week. Hope your summer is winding down nicely.

Best,

Mark

Dance the night away

Due to a heavy client workload I'm going to have to tighten the valve governing the flow of my commentary down to light sprinkle.

I'll just add this: My readers in another blog sometimes ask me if I'm Burr. I should divulge here, (with this comic dealing with age and time), that I'm actually a bit older than Burr...so, let's just say he and the other characters at times may have a vague similarity to actual people. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, "Who are these people?"