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Tom Richmond and The Mad Art of Caricature!

There are many people who consider the humourous paintings of people that I do to be caricature, but just as many who don’t.  I consider traditional caricature to be an exaggeration of features while maintaining the likeness.   At the risk of trying to slap a label on it, my work fits somewhere in between caricaturing a person and cartooning them.  Often it will be a large head, small body, with only mild distortion or exaggeration.  For a lot of business or gift purposes, that’s what my clients want.  But wild exaggeration or not, I still feel that I have a lot to learn.

I have no desire to be a quick-sketch caricature artist, the kind you see at an amusement park or event, but I have a great deal of respect for those who are able to fill that role.  It’s a difficult skill to master and very different from the type of painting and cartooning that I do.  You have to be confident and bold when drawing live, and I’m a tentative obsessive sketcher when I’m drawing people.  I don’t mind admitting that I find quick-sketch caricature very difficult and I’d like to become better at it.

When I think of caricature artists that really wow me with their skill, Tom Richmond tops the list.  Tom is best known for his MAD magazine work, but he’s done a lot more than that in his long career.  Rather than list his accomplishments, take a look at his website and I’ll let his work speak for itself.  I’ve written about Tom before on this blog .  OK, maybe more than once.  What can I say, I’m a fan.

Last week, I received a copy of Tom’s new book “The Mad Art of Caricature: A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces.”  People have been nagging him for years to write a book like this, and whether it’s because he got tired of it, or just realized he was ready and made the time, it was well worth the wait.  I pre-ordered the book sometime this summer, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.  I had very high expectations, and Tom’s book surpassed them.

I’ve bought many cartooning and caricature books over the years, and this one is hands-down the best I’ve ever seen.  From tutorials on how to draw specific body parts, exaggeration, relationships between facial features…I could go on at great length about all of the wonderful specifics he teaches in this book.  It is comprehensive and complete.  There are techniques and tutorials in this book that I’ve never seen explained in any other I’ve bought, not to mention valuable insights into how to become better at live or studio caricature work.  And content aside, it’s quality printing with beautiful colour, too.  Put simply, I would recommend this book to beginners and professionals alike, without reservation.

While reading the book, I just wanted to pick up a pencil and draw.  Yes, I draw every day already, and while it’s enjoyable, it’s not often that I get excited about it.  I’ve said before that Tom’s work makes me want to be a better artist.  I’ve no doubt that his book will teach me how.

To order a copy of your own, here’s the link again.  “The Mad Art of Caricature: A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces.” 

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Time and Tide

Over the past four or five years, I’ve spent a great deal of time learning all I can, working to improve my skills, attending conferences, webinars, and even taking a couple of online courses.  This year, I’ve realized that there isn’t as much out there for me when it comes to education.  Yes, there will always be better artists to learn from, but many of them aren’t lecturing at conferences or teaching courses specific enough to warrant the expense.

I wrote recently that I wouldn’t be attending Photoshop World again next year,  so I considered attending the ICON illustration conference.  I’ve read good reviews, but it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do at the moment.  Earlier this year, I had decided not to attend the Association of Canadian Editorial Cartoonists conference next summer in Montreal, because even though there are people I would like to see, it really isn’t a conference about learning.  I can’t justify the expense for three or four days just to hang out and talk shop.  I realize Montreal is a beautiful city, but my wife and I have other vacation plans for 2012.

One decision I’ve now made for the next year is that unless I’m working or speaking at one, I’m not going to be attending any conferences.

With the success of my animal paintings and the fact that I enjoy them so much, it is very clear that I’ve finally found my niche.  This is the work I’m supposed to be doing and it’s a great feeling to have absolutely no doubt about that.  While I still enjoy drawing cartoons and painting people, painting animals is where I find the most fulfillment.

It is gratifying that my work has a growing following.  The paintings are doing well in both Two Wolves in Canmore and the About Canada Gallery in Banff, I’ve signed my first licensing deal with Island Art Publishers, and I’m beginning to get commissions that are a lot of fun to work on.  While I’m fortunate to enjoy most of the work I’ve been doing the past decade, I’ve never enjoyed it more than when I’m painting.

With a couple of DVDs under my belt, my second webinar for Wacom in a few weeks and some knocks on the door from other companies, it has become clear that I’ve stepped well into the realm of teaching, which is often a logical step for many students to take.  While I still intend to keep learning as much as I can, I’ve found that I’m finally comfortable passing on some of the skills I’ve learned, and I’m enjoying it, too.

But, where to go from here?  It’s a question faced by every freelancer, entrepreneur, and self-employed person and one you end up asking yourself over and over at different stages in any career.  Sure, there are many people who have done it before, some of them poorly and others with monumental success, and while their advice and example can aid in the big decisions, the choices still rest with each individual, and with how much each person is willing to risk.

For most of this past year, I was so focused on the DVDs for PhotoshopCAFE and other commission work, that I added only one painting to my Totem series, which was the Great Horned Owl.  Only one.  When I realized that this summer, I don’t mind saying that I wasn’t pleased.  The one thing I love to do more than anything in my work, and it turned out that I made it the lowest priority.  Obviously, I dropped the ball on that.

For the next year, my main focus will be these paintings.  Not just working on them, but promoting and selling them.  I’ve still got other commission work that I’ll be doing, and another DVD in the works for PhotoshopCAFE, but the main priority will be the work I love to do most.

There can often be a number of ‘right’ choices, and because of this, many people will succumb to the paralysis of making no choice at all.  This is the surest way to stall any progress in a freelance career.  Moving forward has always required taking risks, and part of that risk is making bold decisions without knowing how they’ll turn out.  So rather than play a game of wait and see, I’m going to gamble on success.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to get a Small Press booth at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo at the end of April.  Between now and then, I’ll be preparing promotional material, designing and purchasing a large banner and hardware for the booth, figuring out which varieties of prints to sell, and doing as much research as possible to make sure I put my best foot forward.  This will involve a significant expense, but as the old cliché goes, ‘you have to spend money to make money.’

30,000 people went through the doors last year, so I figure it will be a good place to get my trade show feet wet. I’ll be painting live at the booth all weekend, in addition to selling prints and my DVDs.  I have to figure out how many of each I’ll need.  I could bring way too much and go home with a lot of inventory or fail to bring enough and sell out on Day 2.  It’s a gamble because I don’t know how popular my work will be with the attendees, but there’s only one way to find out.

Either way,  I know that I’m going to learn a lot from the experience, and I won’t be standing still.

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Ostrich Totem

Wait a minute, ostriches don’t live in the Rocky Mountains!  Yes, that’s true, so I guess this one kicks off my African series, something I hadn’t planned on starting for at least another year.  But when life hands you a smart ass ostrich reference photo, what’s a cartoonist to do?

Thanks to Pete Collins, one of the NAPP Photoshop Guys, who sent me some animal photos he’d taken, simply because he thought I might be able to use them.  Pete’s a great guy, but don’t tell him I said that, because his ego is inflated enough (just in case you read this, Pete!). When I saw the ostrich, I thought it looked kind of funny, and since I had a new iPad brush to try out, I decided to do an iPad painting of an ostrich.  Turned out quite well, and that was supposed to be the end of it.

But then my wife saw it, and really liked it.  Shonna doesn’t get excited about my work.  She’s happy I’m doing what I do for a living and she’s able to see things that are wrong in a painting that I might not (especially with likenesses of people), but she’s not a big fan of cartoons or my style of painting.  That’s OK, because she’s still very supportive.  So when she really liked the ostrich, I figured that now I had to REALLY finish it.

She just saw it a few minutes ago and wants a print for her office.  She doesn’t know why, she just really likes this ostrich, and that makes this here painter really happy.  When you’ve been with somebody for 20 years, it takes a lot more effort to impress them.

Here’s a comparison of the iPad painting with the finished painting in Photoshop.

On the iPad the size was 9″X13″ at 72 pixels per inch.  That’s pretty small and the print quality wouldn’t be great.  Can’t get much detail at that size.  The final image, painted in Photoshop is 18″X24″ at 300 pixels per inch.  That’s a nice large size, the detail is crisp and sharp and it will reproduce very nicely on canvas.  Actually, it’ll look even better because canvas adds a depth and richness to my paintings that I really like.

So what have I learned?  Well, painting on the iPad just became a lot more useful.  This painting took me a lot less time to paint in Photoshop because I’d already done the real work on structure and fleshing it out on the iPad.  Sort of like a really detailed sketch.  I will definitely do this again, paint first on the iPad, and use that as a base for a finished painting.

It’s unlikely I’ll be printing any limited editions for sale of this one quite yet, because it really doesn’t fit with the galleries here in Canmore and Banff.  Tourists here are looking for mountain wildlife, not African.  But eventually, I’ve no doubt this will get printed just like the others.  It was fun, I really enjoyed working on it, and best of all, my wife likes it.

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Photo Reference

It’s quite common for me to say that if I take a good photograph, it’s by accident.  The main reason is that taking a good shot doesn’t come naturally to me, and I haven’t the interest in putting in the time required to become better at it.  That’s the key to becoming good at something, devoting yourself to it completely when everyone else around you gives up.  Many people will tell me that they ‘can’t even draw a stick  man,’ which of course is an exaggeration because everybody can draw a stick man, but I get what they’re saying.  The truth is that if a person really does want to become a better artist, they have to be willing to do what it takes to get there.  So it’s not about being willing to draw one stick man, it’s about being willing to draw thousands of them in pursuit of the perfect stick man.

It’s obvious that I’m never going to be a really good at taking photos.  Sure, I’d like to take better snapshots, and over the past few years hanging out with a lot of photographers, I am doing that, but I have no illusion that I’ll ever have any real skill.  My heart just isn’t in it, and truth be told, learning the technical aspects of cameras, lights and equipment  just seems like studying for a math final to me, and I hated math.

Thankfully, I’ve already found my passion elsewhere, but there is still a lot I can learn from photographers.

I love looking at beautiful images and the artistry that photographers put into their work is not lost on me.  Some of my best friends and many of my favorite artists are photographers.  I don’t need to understand how Andrew Zuckerman does what he does to know that I love his images.  Same applies to the work of  Jill Greenberg, Joe McNally, and Moose Peterson.   I know that if you click on any of these links right now, I’ve probably lost you, and I can’t fault you for that.

As a painter, I have learned a lot from photographers.  Images are images, and often, many of the things that contribute to making a great photograph will apply to illustration and painting.  Composition, lighting, texture, atmosphere, and the things done in post processing, all of these important elements directly translate to the work I do.

With that in mind, I’ll often buy books written by photographers, especially if they’re more about how to take a good photograph, rather than how to use the equipment.  Additionally, I’ll buy books about the business of photography as it is very much like the business of illustration and painting.  We show our work in galleries, we work on commission for clients, we deal with the same copyright, licensing issues and agreements.  The talent and skills required may be different, but the disciplines are similar.

What I often learn most from these books is how much more I’ve yet to learn, and I expect that will always be the case.  What I find most fascinating is that the philosophy and dedication required to be a successful photographer is the same as any other creative and artistic profession.  There’s a lot to learn from other creative professionals, especially if they’re working in an entirely different field, because it forces you to consider another perspective.  A musician will have something to teach an actor, an actor will have something to teach a photographer, and a photographer will have something to teach a painter.

I’m currently reading two books on photography right now, and am enjoying them very much.  I’ve had the pleasure of taking a couple of classes from Scott Bourne at Photoshop World, and recently did some caricature work for Moose Peterson, so I was eager to get their books.  Not only is there valuable insight and information in both of them, but as expected,  some beautiful images, too.

Now you can go back and click on those links. 🙂

 

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Another Wacom Webinar: Cartooning Techniques!

Since the last one was so well received, the good folks at Wacom have invited me back for another webinar on November 22nd.  While the previous one touched on both cartooning and painting, turns out that some folks felt there was not enough on each, so this one will focus on some more techniques and methods I use in my everyday editorial and illustration cartooning.  A number of these techniques are included on my DVD from PhotoshopCAFE, but I’ve also added a few other things to this webinar that aren’t on the DVD.

I really enjoyed the last one and heard from a lot of people that did as well, so I’m looking forward to another opportunity to share a little of what I know about cartooning in Photoshop.  Hope you can join me in November.

Click HERE to register for the upcoming webinar (or on the image.)  If you’d like to take a look at the last one, here’s the link to Wacom’s YouTube channel.

 

 

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Bighorn Sheep Totem

Another painting done!  I’ve been working on this one for many months, off and on.  When I was doing painting demos at the galleries in Banff and Canmore at the beginning of this year, this is one of the paintings I was working on.  For some reason, I kept putting it aside in favour of other projects or paintings.  With the Fall season upon us, and my commitment to paint a lot more in the next few months, I figured it was a great time to finish it, and once I got going, I couldn’t put it away.

My father is not a professional photographer, but he and my Mom had been camping in British Columbia last Fall, and he took some great photos for me of a bighorn ram.  I had a number of them to work from and they really worked well.  Thanks, Dad!

This was easily one of my most challenging paintings.  Because of the publicity for my Totem paintings over the past year, and my recent painting DVD, I’ve been feeling the need to stretch my skills and try to put even more detail into these.  I tried some new brush techniques for this one, and even created an entirely new brush for the detail on the horns, something I haven’t done in awhile.  I couldn’t even guess how many hours I put into this, but it’s a lot, probably double what I’ve spent on any painting before this.  As always, I could have kept going, but you just have to call it at some point.  Finishing this up on a Friday morning just felt right.

I’ve got five paintings planned for the next few months, and have already sourced and acquired the usage permissions for the reference photos.  Two of those paintings will kick off completely new series, so I’m pretty excited about that.  I still get a big thrill out of finishing one of these, and I’m ready to start another one.  I’ve got some commission work to get to in the next week, so I’ll use that time as a buffer between this and the next painting.

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Painting, Projects, and Promotion

As I’m not a fan of the holiday season, I’ll tend to keep to myself over the next couple of months.  With that in mind, I plan to keep busy with paintings and other projects and I’ve made sure that I’ve got plenty on the go, including a number of paintings.

One project I’ve planned is creating a short promotional video of my painted work.  Not sure how I’ll use it, but I still think it’ll be a fun challenge.  Basically, it’ll be a video commercial for one of my animal paintings, which translates to all of my paintings.

I recently acquired the license for four reference images for wildlife paintings and while I’m looking forward to working on all of them, there is one in particular that has me excited.  The image is very clear in my mind, and the photo I have to work from is incredible in its detail.  With that in mind, I’m going to create a 2.5 minute video of the whole painting process, from start to finish.  Most of the painting will be sped up quite a bit, but there will be sections from the entire process included in the video, sketches to finished work.

This video you see here is a test, using the bighorn sheep painting that I’m currently working on.  You have to look closely to see some of the brushwork that I’m doing in the video, something I’ll do better in the future piece.  This is about 20 minutes of painting, sped up to be around 2 minutes in the video.  I bought the royalty-free piece of music yesterday, and while the license cost more than three CDs, you have to pay for quality and it’s not like I’ll be doing this on a regular basis.

I’m a big fan of movie-making and movies in general, and there’s a lot added by an appropriate piece of music.  This one is fine for the bighorn sheep painting, but it’s a perfect fit for the actual painting and animal I’m planning to use it for.  In this video, you don’t get to see the whole painting, and that’s intentional, because it’ll be done this week and I don’t want to show it too early.  The real detail has yet to be painted.

This was a learning process, but not as difficult as I thought it would be.  Some of the things I’ve got planned for the next one will be complicated with the software I have, but figuring that out will be part of the fun.

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The genius next door

Steve Jobs truly was a diamond in the rough.  You need only look at his extensive list of accomplishments, his patents and his rise from an average existence to his becoming the man whose life so many are reflecting on today.

Despite his faults, (no, he was not perfect) his legacy will be that of a genius and a tenacious innovator who not only took the path less travelled, but made a new one when even that proved too worn for his liking.

I’ll admit to being a little uncomfortable with some of the tributes I’ve seen today, and the almost deification of the man by so many people that didn’t know him, and yet are speaking of him as if they have lost a close family member.  I was even uncomfortable creating my own cartoon about it today, because even though I knew my newspapers would want one, I don’t like memorial tribute style editorial cartoons.  Often overly dramatic, they do seem to be widely published, however, which is why I keep doing them.

Our society has become addicted to celebrity worship and mass emotional displays on social media.  People have been talking about how Steve Jobs changed their lives, how Mac computers changed the world, how without him, they wouldn’t be who they are today.  Yes, it’s true that your life would be different had Steve Jobs not created Apple.   But if the invention of a newer, better computer hadn’t come to pass, would you somehow be less than you are today?

Now forgive this tangent, but I assure you it is relevant…

Earlier this week, I read the story of 70 year old Daniel Schechtman, a researcher at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.  Schechtman is this year’s Nobel Prize winner in the field of chemistry for his work in discovering quasicrystals.  Now, I won’t pretend for a second that I have any knowledge about his work.  I barely passed high school chemistry.

But reading about his story, I found it fascinating that Schechtman was openly ridiculed, actually vilified for his discovery when he first suggested it in 1982.  His colleagues in the science community called him a disgrace, laughed at him, and booted him out of a prestigious research group for “bringing disgrace on the team.”

It took years before his work was recognized and you don’t find much better vindication than the Nobel Prize.  But, I wonder how many of his colleagues that dismissed him as a lunatic are now telling their friends how they believed in him all along.

So, it’s not the products Steve Jobs created that I find myself thinking about today, but the person he was almost 40 years ago.

I wonder what the reaction would have been in the beginning, if a young dropout Steve Jobs had told somebody at the local Hare Krishna temple where he went for free meals, that he would one day design computers that would change the way the world works and communicates.  Somehow I don’t envision a long line of eager investors.

Makes me wonder what the neighbors and colleagues thought of the bicycle repairmen, Orville and Wilbur Wright or the apprentice printer, Ben Franklin, or a young patent clerk named Albert Einstein who had a hard time getting noticed by his boss.

Steve Jobs changed the world.  Of that, there is no doubt.  He deserves our respect and admiration for his vision and accomplisments.  But it is easy to support someone after they have achieved monumental success, because it’s a pretty comfortable bandwagon.

And no, buying a Mac in the 80’s doesn’t count.

I’d like to meet the two or three people that believed in him early on, because those people change the world, too.  They do so by encouraging the dreamers, the idealists, the ‘different thinkers,’ when everyone else dismisses them as lunatics.

What if your own neighbor, or better yet, your neighbor’s kid, told you he or she was working on an interstellar propulsion drive that would be cost effective, have no pollution, could achieve light speed travel and would run on a microscopic amount of sea water, and it’ll be ready in 20 years.    I guarantee that there are thousands of people in the world right now working on ideas and innovations that sound just that surrealistic, and you might even know one or two of them.    Would you even consider investing your savings in that idea?  Probably not, but we’d all like to go back in time and give a few thousand bucks to a couple of computer nerds toiling away in their garage, wouldn’t we?

Yes, many of those people are probably nuts, but I would wager that more than a few of them are on the cusp of greatness.

It might even be you, and if it is, I wish you luck.  Don’t give up, and don’t listen to the ridicule.  Hopefully your eventual success might inspire people to believe in their own possibilities, because we all have greatness within us.  And if you can’t find anybody to believe in you, don’t stop believing in yourself.  Because that’s what it takes to be somebody like Steve Jobs, believing in your own potential even when nobody else does.

Success is all around us, and it starts with that simple belief.  That’s the message we should take away from his passing.  And in the time between the world paying tribute to your achievements when you die, there will be years of working hard when everybody else is taking time off.  Yes, we did indeed lose a visionary in our time this week, but there are millions more all around us, maybe even a few that 20 or 30 years from now, we’ll pause a moment to pay tribute to when they pass.  It might even be you.

But of course, you won’t be around to see it.  So don’t do it for any applause or recognition.  Do it for the reason in the cartoon.

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Ostrich – iPad Painting

Here’s another painting I did on the iPad over a period of three or four days.  This is the kind of thing I like to do while sitting watching TV, as it’s not on deadline and is just fun to work on.

This was painted using the Procreate app, the Wacom Bamboo Stylus and the Nomad mini brush, which arrived last week.  While I’m very happy with the Wacom, I’ve been seeing ads and reviews for the Nomad brush around the net and I thought I’d give it a try.  Because I like having everything portable, I bought the mini brush instead of the longer ones and I really enjoyed working with it.  It doesn’t really do anything I can’t do with the Wacom stylus, but when it came to working on the little hairs and some subtle shading, it was more enjoyable to work with as it glides over the screen a lot easier than a traditional stylus.

I wouldn’t want to be limited to only the Nomad brush, however.  While it’s great for painting, I don’t like it for drawing, but then, it’s not really designed for that anyway.  After finishing this painting using the Wacom and the Nomad, I’m going to continue to use them both.  They each have their strengths and I enjoyed using them both on this painting.  The only downside of the brush is that you want to be careful not to squash or wreck the bristles by leaving it lying around.  I was thinking that a little cap would have been a good thing to include with this brush/stylus.  But then again, I’d probably lose the cap, so it’s probably fine the way it is.

When I’m using the iPad, I have the brightness set to 50 percent.  Because I spend so much time in front of the computer, the brightness of my desktop monitor is set pretty low as well.  I plan to preserve my eyesight as long as possible, so I try to minimize my exposure to bright light.  The downside of working on the iPad is that it means making adjustments for that before posting.  There are a few apps out there that will make color and brightness adjustments but I’m still getting used to how far I have to push things to get them to look right online.  It’s an ongoing process, but I’m learning.

This close-up is actual pixels, 72 ppi, so you can see that this is one of the limitations of working on the iPad.  I have the first generation iPad, and I know the 2nd generation has better resolution, so you’ll be able to get a little more detail, but not a lot more.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I did bring this into Photoshop for some color adjustment.  Every monitor is going to be different, but mine is calibrated and the color I saw on the iPad is not what it looked like when I emailed it to myself in order to post it.  So while all of the brush work was done on the iPad, I did do a Hue/Saturation and Levels adjustment on my desktop.  I also used a bit of Smart Sharpen.  Here, you can see the difference side by side.  While the one on the left is what I got from the iPad in my inbox, the one of the right (after adjustments) more closely resembles what I was seeing on the iPad when I was working on it.

The iPad will not replace my Wacom tablet and Photoshop anytime soon, so you might wonder why I bother.  It really is just for the fun and the challenge of it.  I’m enjoying seeing just how far I can take a painting before I can’t go any further.  This is equivalent to painting in low-res in Photoshop and that translates directly to my more detailed paintings because they all start in low-res.  Working on the iPad with limited tools and resolution does end up making my more detailed work better because it forces me to do my best on the foundation of the painting before working on the fine details.

While I intended this to end at being an iPad painting, I’m toying with the idea of bringing it into Photoshop, bumping up the resolution and making a full size, full resolution painting out of it, because I know I can take it further.  It’ll mean working a number of more hours on it, but I think the end result might be something I’ll be proud of.

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A dog and his painting.

Regular readers will know the story by now, but long story short, my friend Pat Wendt in Lincoln, Nebraska has this wonderful little dog named Don Diego.  When it came time to record my animal painting DVD for PhotoshopCAFE, I thought he’d be the perfect subject.  Since Pat is a talented photographer, I knew I’d get a great reference photo to work from, and I certainly did.  In exchange for the use of her photo (and her dog), I gave her some prints, copies of both of my DVD’s, my undying gratitude and the framed stretched canvas painting that you see here.

When it comes to digital painting, the finished piece ends up being a digital file, so when it comes to ‘the original’, it’s whatever the artist certifies as such.  As I included a certificate of authenticity with the painting, Pat now owns the original of this work.  It’s hanging in the bookstore, Bluestem Books, that she and her husband Scott own in Lincoln.  I asked Pat to take this photo for me so that I could see the painting with the subject.

Now there’s a dog with charisma!