illustration

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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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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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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Tip: Increase Productivity Using Adobe Illustrator’s Layer Masks

| George Coghill

The excellent Illustrator blog BittBox has a nice Adobe Illustrator Layer Mask tip/walkthough on how to use this highly useful, productivity-enhancing (and fairly obscure) feature of Illustrator CS and higher.

Layer Masks are basically clipping masks that apply to the entire layer (Layer masks need to be sub-layers, and the top-most one at that). The best feature is that they can be locked, and they are not tied to one specific object, or cause an entire group of unrelated objects to become “grouped” as they are when applying a clipping mask to them. This allows you to work normally with all the other objects on other sub-layers while still getting that clipping mask effect.

Head on over to BittBox and read the full post: Improve Your Illustrator Workflow with Layer Masking

Ten Essential Low-Tech (and Cheap!) Tools for Cartoonists & Illustrators

| George Coghill

Still using that pencil you found in the couch and an old dictionary as a drawing board? Don’t feel like the biggest computer wiz when it comes to graphics software? There are plenty of inexpensive tools out there that will boost your productivity and enjoyment level when drawing, sketching or just doodling. And you don’t have to spend a ton of money to expand your tool kit in ways that are sure to make your life much easier, giving you more time to draw.

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Sexy Cartoon School Girl Pin-Up – now avaialble at MyPSPTubes.com

| George Coghill

Sexy cartoon schoolgirl pinup illustration

A new sexy cartoon school girl pinup has recently been added to my slowly growing collection over at MyPSPTubes*. This one was fun to work on. I wanted to play on the classic fighter plane nose cone art where the girls were straddling a plane (or a bomb!). I thought the number two pencil was perfect. She was given glasses at one point for that sexy librarian look we all love, but it just didn’t work with the overall design. Continue reading →