How To Become a Great Cartoonist - The HARD Way

This inspiring article ("How To Pick An Animation School") at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive shows us how all those classic animators and cartoonists got to be so good. Along the way this post confirms what we've always suspected... the road to greatness in cartooning or any other craft is paved with lots of study, hard work, curiosity and perseverance. We can't afford to ever stop learning!

ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive: Theory: How To Pick An Animation School

Funny Snaps

Cute Animals

On Newsstands Now: New SpongeBob Magazine Cover

It's been a while since I did storyboards on the SpongeBob TV series, but I still get to keep my hand in it a bit when I do comics and illustrations for Nickelodeon Magazine. A couple months ago I got a call from them about drawing another cover, and I'm glad I jumped at it 'cause it was a lot of fun (Ok, it was a lot of work, too...but more on that later).

The three sketches below are my first attempts to draw SpongeBob blowing funny bubble shapes. I was trying really hard to get that bubble away from his face...

Well, it turns out there's not enough room on the cover to have that bubble so far from his face, so I had to try to have SpongeBob facing frontward, with the bubble overlapping his face, but without obscuring his smiling features!

This took quite a bit of pencil wrangling, but by the time I drew the two sketches below, I thought it was working OK. The sketch on the left is the one went with, but I kept drawing. Even after I think I've nailed it, I try to do more drawings to see if something unexpected happens. In this case, the next drawing I did wasn't as good, so I decided to take the good one and scan it in so I could play around with the composition.

Next, I threw in a whole buncha bubbles to show that SpongeBob has been having a great time amusing himself with his boundless bubble creativity. His bubbles were supposed to reflect his hopes, dreams, wishes and obsessions. I used TV Paint 8.5 tough up the sketch and cobble all the bubble drawings together into this pretty-much-finished pencil drawing below:

After submitting the above pencil drawing to Nickelodeon Magazine, the editors just asked me to change SpongeBob's eye direction. Originally they wanted him looking right at the "camera," but now they wanted me to have him looking at the bubble. Okey-dokey...no problem. Here's the inked version (below). I do all this sort of inking in Adobe Illustrator, using the freehand brush tool.

Finally, I "painted" the background using some pieces from stock backgrounds from the series that were painted long ago. I added the flower clouds by hand, and then blurred them in Photoshop. The hard part was getting the bubbles to look right; Each one has four layers with various transparencies. The flat colors on SpongeBob were done with the eyedropper and paint bucket tools. I sample the colors off of SpongeBob stock model sheets to make sure they're 100% accurate.

I had to leave a lot of room around the character for the Nick Magazine staff to put in all the headlines and bar codes and stuff. I kept all the bubbles on separate layers, giving the art director the freedom to move them around and resize them depending on the needs of the layout. And there you have it:

Thanks to Tim Jones, Laura Galen, Chris Duffy and the Nick Mag staff for giving me this "cover shot!"

UPDATE: The newest issue of Nickelodeon Magazine features my latest SpongeBob painting...

Click on the painting to see the whole process!

UPDATE! The first Tutorial Videos are posted!

here are the first eleven

Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Inking
tutorial videos:

#1 - How to Set Up and Import Images
in Adobe Illustrator

#2 - Palette Options and Settings

#3 - How to Use the Illustrator BRUSH Tool

#4 - Adobe Illustrator Cartoon Inking

#5 - How to Use Shape Tools in Illustrator

#6 - How to Use Adobe Illustrator Graphic Styles

#7 - Working With Reshape Tool and Layers

#8 - Arrange, Transform, Reflect in Illustrator
#9 - Adobe Illustrator - Picking Up The Pace

#10 - Finishing SpongeBob Digital Inking

#11 - Illustrator Digital Inking Finale

Keep checking this list of tutorial videos for more!

Storyboard Art from The Mist and Mars Attacks

Fangoria magazine has just published an online article that features some cool storyboard art by Pete Von Sholly from the new Stephen King and Frank Darabont horror flick, The Mist.

I really like the way these pages look...they read very clearly. Even though they're rendered and shaded, the line work still looks fast and loose. You can see more at:

http://www.fangoria.com/news_article.php?id=5535

Cartoonist and storyboard artist Pete Von Sholly also has his own website where you can see some storyboard art from Mars Attacks:

http://www.vonshollywood.com/marsbdsindex.html

Find out more about this prolific storyboard artist at: http://www.vonshollywood.com/pvs.html

*****

Wanna know HOW to storyboard?
...then please take a minute to fill out this
Storyboard Course Poll
at
http://HOWtoSTORYBOARD.com

Hanna Barbera Treasury Book -- This Time They Got it RIGHT!

I just came across this new art book about Hanna Barbera's golden years called, "Hanna Barbera Treasury." There is so much wonderfulness to this giant-sized love-letter that I had to share it with all of you.

The Hanna Barbera Treasury is written by Jerry Beck, with photography by Tim Mantoani published by Insight Editions. It measures a big 11 1/2" tall by 11 inches wide, and it's about 3/4 inch thick with 157 memorabilia-stuffed pages. If you're impatient like me, it costs $45 in bookstores, but Amazon has it for $29.70 (as of Nov 29th).

Now, 157 pages may not sound that substantial, but what you can't tell from that number is that every oversized page is PACKED with photos of REAL production artwork (not those awful fakey-fake publicity "cels.") -- most of which was apparently photographed from original archival artwork! There are pictures of storyboards, layouts, animation drawings, model sheets, development sketches, character designs, etc...stuff that has never seen the light of day until now. I've been waiting for someone to put together this kind of book for ages.

There are also tons of beautiful photos of vintage H-B collectible and toys, like plastic dolls and View-Master reels. If you remember the groundbreaking art direction in Chip Kidd's Batman Animated art book from the nineties, you can imagine what this looks like.

The other feature that really expands the page-count is that there are tons of little envelopes and pockets and pamphlets bound into this book that contain beautiful facsimiles of trading cards, full-color 12-page mini-comic book reprints, Model sheets, storyboard sequences and vintage activity-book pages.

There are separate chapters for all of the early Hanna-Barbera stars (in chronological order), including a chapter EACH devoted to:

• Tom and Jerry
• Ruff and Reddy
• Huckleberry Hound
• Pixie and Dixie
• Yogi Bear
• Quick-Draw McGraw
• Augie Doggie
• Snagglepuss
• The Flintstones
• Top Cat
• The Jetsons
• Magilla Gorilla
• Peter Potamus
• Sqiddly Diddly
• Touche Turtle
• Lippy The Lion
• Jonny Quest
• Space Ghost
• Atom Ant
• Secret Squirrel and Morocco Mole
• Frankenstein, Jr and the Impossibles
• Birdman
• Wacky Races
• Space Ghost
• Scooby-Doo

...and THEY STOP RIGHT THERE! Oh, happy day!

There's no need to pretend that the entire history of Hanna Barbera is totally golden...most of their output after the late sixties was totally forgettable. But they wisely chose to focus on the best of the best!

If you felt horribly cheated by that awful Hanna Barbera Cartoons coffee-table book from 1999, this new book should make you forget all about that publishing nightmare. This new book a winner through and through! Caveat: I haven't READ the text yet, so I'm looking at this purely from a visual standpoint. I'm guessing that based on the love and devotion that obviously went into the art direction of this book, they probably didn't skimp on the textual accuracy either.

The text is written by animation historian and Cartoon Brew-meister Jerry Beck, so I'm looking forward to reading it and posting another review later to complete the picture.

Now go out and buy it! We want to encourage this kind of thing! ^_^

PS...if you're in LA on Dec.1st, say Hi to Jerry and get your book signed! More info at the Animation Archive