SCUBA & Snorkeling Fins Dive Flag T-Shirt

| George Coghill

SCUBA/snorkeling fin dive flag t-shirt designI just posted this SCUBA dive flag t-shirt design up on Zazzle. I was going through some of my archives and had forgotten about this one. I came up with this after taking a camping trip to the Florida Keys (the Bahia Honda Key in particular) a few years ago.

The campsites are right on the beach (with electricity even!), and it’s one of the few areas in the world where snorkeling can be done right from the shore. The entire group brought snorkeling gear “just in case”, but we all found ourselves instant snorkeling enthusiasts from day one. From the outside, it seems kinda boring. When you are actually doing it, it’s inexplicably awesome. Since the creative gears are always crankin’, I ended up working up some sketches for t-shirt ideas and when this one popped up, I knew I had a winner. And then I promptly filed it away and lost track of it for three years!

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Digital Coloring Tutorials by MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond

| George Coghill

MAD Magazine cartoonist Tom Richmond digital coloring tutorial screenshotIf you aren’t familiar with cartoonist Tom Richmond, make yourself familiar. This guy’s work is absolutely amazing. Very much in the style of Mort Drucker from MAD Magazine — only taken to the extreme. Not only is his cartooning & caricature style excellent, but his color work is also phenomenal. Tom graciously has taken the time to outline exactly how he digitally colors his artwork in Photoshop in a juicily-detailed three-post tutorial/how-to series on his cartooning blog.

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Feedback: Del.ici.ous Link Posts; Blog: Post Frequency Update

| George Coghill

Lately work has become quite busy, and updating the blog has become less frequent because of this. I try to, for the most part, make sure the entries are substantial and well-linked, and that takes time. I thought that it would be preferable to slow down rather than add fluff posts just to fill my daily blog quota. Of course the occasional art or artist post will be published when I find something cool.

The automatic del.ici.ous link posts I thought would be a good way to keep the information flowing without having full posts. I am curious how the readers out there feel about the del.ici.ous link posts — should they stay or go?

And while you are posting in the comments, please feel free to offer suggestions for future posts you’d like to see or topics you’d like to see covered. Lately it seems I have been overdosing on the Adobe Illustrator topic, and I would like to get more focused on cartooning and illustration in general. Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees…

I look forward to your thoughts.

Productivity Tip: Floating, Transparent Reference Images Using Screenshots & Free Software Afloat

| George Coghill

Afloat transparent window software for Mac OS X - screenshotEver need to temporarily reference another document while working on something – this may be an image, or instructions, or a PDF file. Many times you want it floating right on top of your current document so you can refer to it while you are working, and not have to switch back and forth between applications.

I do this a lot when working in Illustrator, especially working from reference images, but also the occasional email message or PDF file sent by a client.

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Color Theory Resources

| George Coghill

Color Wheel artwork

Primary, secondary, tertiary, complimentary, analagous, brightness, hue, value, saturation, tints, shades… do these words mean anything to you? They should.

A post by cartoonist Matt Glover points out ColorFAQ – very basic web guide to color theory. It got me poking around on the internet for some other sites with some more depth on the subject. Sometimes I forget how much I use color theory every single day, it’s just something that sometimes goes on autopilot and is an easy topic to forget to recommend to others.

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Content Aware Image Resizing – Video of New Computer Graphics Technology

| George Coghill

This one is hard to explain without watching the YouTube video over at Creative Bits: Content Aware Image Resizing

The video is a demonstration/presentation from the annual SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on GRAPHics and Interactive Techniques) Conference. In short, the video demonstrates computer algorithms which allow an image to be resized horizontally or vertically non-proportionally, without distorting the image. Elements are “reshuffled” inside the image to keep the same basic look of the visual information.

Very interesting.

Pencil Grades: An Overview

| George Coghill

Bunch of pencilsI touched on the awesomeness of using multiple pencil grades in a previous post on essential cartoonist tools before, but there’s a great overview specifically on pencil grades by cartoonist Matt Glover. There’s some decent additional pencil grade classification information over at Wikipedia as well.

Find out what those cryptic “2B”, “HB”, “6H” and the rest really mean. Knowing the difference, having a full set of pencils with all the grades in the range is a must. This is the way to lay down very thick, dark blacks in your drawings as well as fine, light grays. It’s all in the blackness and hardness my friends.

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Cleveland Clinic Medical Mart Star Wars Parody – Cleveland Free Times August 15, 2007 Issue

| George Coghill

Mart Wars - Star Wars themed parody on the Medical Mart controversy in Cleveland OhioI (very) recently worked on a two-page spread illustration for the Cleveland Free Times issue that comes out this week (Wed. Aug. 15, 2007). The piece was a satire on the controversial Cleveland Clinic “Medical Mart” being proposed in Cleveland, Ohio.

Writer James Renner found my work via my website and wanted me to illustrate his Star Wars themed parody of the shenanigans. The piece was done in a cartoon style (obviously) reminiscent of MAD Magazine, as I was flexing some serious Mort Drucker, Sam Viviano & Jack Davis idolisation while creating the piece.

Staff writer Renner, along with Editor Frank Lewis were extremely pleased with the final piece, which was created on a super-tight deadline (even after being given a requested week’s bump by Art Director Ron Kretsch due to many existing and pressing projects on my end).

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The Cartoon Research Library at Ohio State University

| George Coghill

Who knew that Ohio State University has a Cartoon Research Library? Who knew anybody had a Cartoon Research Library?

A quick search to test the database, I searched for “Mort Drucker, magazine cartoon, MAD Magazine” (by selecting from the pre-existing categories in the search fields). Turns out you only get a textual search result, much like an old-school computer card catalog in a library.

They also sponsor an annual Festival of Cartoon Art, which this year is held October 26-27, 2007.