Category: Video

Cartoon #6673 Sketch to Ink

andertoons

Lately I’ve been testing out a new setup for getting video of me working. Let me know what you think:

Video transcription:

Hi there. This is Mark Anderson from andertoons.com and I’m going to show you how I sketch and resketch and ink a cartoon from beginning to end. So, here we’re starting with the first pencil sketch. The cartoon I’m going to be doing is a medical cartoon where a guy is at the doctor and the doctor is giving him some advice. So, you can see I start with a circle there for the head and I’m drawing the legs. I go pretty fast with the initial sketch because I like to try to keep it real lose and real easy and I know that I’m going to do a sort of cleaned up version of this for myself later on, so I’m not super worried about how things go or erasing or changing things in the first sketch. So here he is on the little table. I got to say, this isn’t one of my favorite scenes to draw because it’s sort of a weird angle but I haven’t quite figured out a good way to do it yet and get the idea of being in that waiting room at the doctor. Okay. Here’s the doctor, I am putting a little bit different hair on him. I didn’t draw the rest of the guy’s legs over on the left because I’m planning on cutting the scene off there. I’ve drawn the scene a lot so I know that I’ll probably cut it off right there so I don’t even go all the way down and you can see I’m not even worrying like I’m drawing his arm right over the rest of him. Again, this is a very, very quick sort of dirty sketch. This part it only takes a few minutes. So see I’m sort of framing it in there, I’m sort of framing it and putting in some more details, making things a little darker for myself. I don’t know if that line over there is the one for the patient’s other arm. What am I doing? Oh, I’m giving him… oh I changed it into a gown. It’s been a little while since I looked at this. For a second, I thought I was giving him really long arm. I’m changing it to a gown because I hate drawing; the guy is in a boxer shorts at the doctor because it’s sort of a weird angle to draw the shorts from with the legs coming out. Yeah. That’s right, so I changed this to a like a gown. Like he got into a gown to be examined and I’m just finishing some… I don’t really need to sign this first sketch; I don’t know why I’m doing that but all right.

We’re going to be moving on to the cleaned up sketch here in just a second but there is one last look at the rough sketch and here we’re back. There…now, I’m turning on my light desk at the table there and getting my couple of pieces of paper lined up and trust me, it will focus here in just a second. So I have a drawing or drafting table and then I have a real flat light desk that I keep on top of it and then I use my giant hand there to keep you from seeing things. Now, I’m doing the clean-up sketch, this is like another chance for me to work on things that I liked and didn’t liked in the sketch before I ink it. I don’t necessarily need to do this but I find it over the years that it actually saves me time to do this sort of cleanup sketch even for myself. I do this for clients a lot because if you show a client that rough sketch, that beginning sketch and you say, “Well, here it is. What do you think?” They’re all like, “Oh… it’s terrible”. So you can’t show them, you have to show them a cleaned up sketch and I found over the years that doing a cleaned-up sketch for myself like this moves things along because you leave it real rough and then you go right to ink. At least for me, I find little problems then and I end up inking two or three times sometimes on a complicated cartoon. So over the years, I’ve just gotten used to doing this sort of like resketch for myself.

So basically, I’m tracing but I’m trying to trace quickly and lightly and I’m not…again, I don’t want to get bogged down in all kinds up nit-picky details because then you sort of leech the life out of the cartoon and I don’t want that. I want it to look sort of dashed off like I just sat down with my pen and ink and just went… oh look, oh the cartoon just flows, who knows where they come from. You want it to look like that but it doesn’t ever work like that. So there’s the finish clean-up sketch and I’m turning off the light desk so you can get a better look at it and focus, focus.

And so there is the rough sketch. It’s sort of messy and there is the cleaned up sketch for me. Rough sketch, clean up sketch. Rough sketch, clean up sketch.

All right, now what I’m going to show you is I take this cleaned up sketch and this is mainly because I’m getting old and my visions isn’t what it once was. I take this cleaned up sketch and I scan it… oh, it’s big. I scan it in, I have a little self-feeding scanner so I take this sketch here, I scan it in and then I blow it up. I print it out at about, I don’t know, 150%, something like that and then this is what I’ll do the ink off of. I used to… upside-down cartoon. See, I use the same piece of paper to do a bunch of cartoons. So yeah, up there at the top you see the other cartoon that I was working on upside-down. Now, I’m taping this on… taping my ink paper onto the sketch here so that it doesn’t move on while I’m working on it.

Yeah. I generally work small but I found—like in the past year, I need to work bigger but I don’t sketch big and I like my sketches to be what they are and I don’t want to change how big I sketch so I found the way it works for me is I don’t worry about anything what I’m sketching and then once I’m done with it then I blow it up to a size that I feel comfortable inking so that way I feel like I’m staying true to the original sketch but then I can draw something that I can see and the line isn’t like an inch thick when you’re done.

So I’m doing some inking here. You see I move pretty fast. I’m not worried about getting every line exactly as they were on the sketch. The sketch is sort of a guide more than anything and I’m just trying to move fast and loose and again keep that spontaneity in the final art that I have in the sketch hopefully. Now, this is of course like the third time I’ve done this little piece so every time, it becomes a little clearer and a little more finished but I really don’t want it to be dead on the page so I try to move fast and easy and just keep it fresh. There, I’m drawing the tie, putting in my little details there. All told like to do the first sketch and then the second sketch and then going here to ink. This video clock saying it’s just about 9-½ minutes. Of course, there’s time for scanning stuff in and I still need to shade it, I’ll do that in Photoshop. I used to do it with markers but I found now that I’m working bigger with my inks, it was taking so much time with the markers and I was using so many markers so that’s another thing that’s changed recently as I do all of my shading in Photoshop now. I recreated my markers, my Prismacolor markers into like an endless pattern in the different percentages and Photoshop and that’s what I use for shading now.

It looks pretty good and I try to keep that as organic as possible. Here’s that gown again, it’s looking pretty good and there’s his legs coming down. I don’t like to draw a feet so if I can cut that off so I don’t have to draw feet. I’m doing it, I am cheating. I am terrible at feet so unless I really have to draw them, I don’t.

So, it’s looking like a pretty good scene, just about done here. Need to add my signature. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you… you can check out this cartoon on my website. I forget which number it is but just look under medical or doctor and you’ll see it. And here it is, I’m turning off the tracing and there you go. So hope you like it, andertoons.com.
 

Add Images to Email Newsletters – Video Tutorial

andertoons

One of the best uses of my new cartoon subscriptions is email newsletters.

Cartoons are perfect for email newsletters where increasing opens by tenths of a percent is a big deal. So enjoy this short video, and consider pepping up your content and keeping your readers engaged by adding relevant and entertaining cartoons.

Video transcript:

Hi there, this is Mark Anderson from andertoons.com. And I’m here to show you in this short video how to add cartoons or really any other kind of image to your email newsletter. It’s a great way to encourage readership and sharing and it’s really easy to do, so let’s get started.

We’re going to use three different email newsletter providers here, we’re going to use – I’m going to show you how to use Constant Contact, we’re also going to use AWeber, and then we’re going to do MailChimp. MailChimp is the one I’m most familiar with, so we’re going to end with that one and finish strong. These other two if I fumble just a little bit bear with me, I’m not as used to them, but they are all similar and it’s really easy to do.

So, here we are in Constant Contact and we are going to create an email. Let’s pick a nice template here. We’re going to pick business. And here comes our readymade business template with all sorts of nice stock photography and places to put our text.

So, we’re going to get a cartoon and put it into the first article, it’s this one right here under article headline, and we’re going to click into the article block and then you can see we can go in here and highlight text that’s where we would write our article but we are concerned with the image, so we’re going to go over here where they have a space already for us to insert our image and we’re going to double click. Now don’t worry, it’s telling us that there are no images found but that’s only because we don’t have any images uploaded yet. So, what we’re going to do is click the upload image button. And we’re going to click select files and here I have all kinds of cartoons, I’ve got one picked up that we’re going to use, I’ll show it to you here. “I’m working harder on working smarter so I don’t have to work so hard,” and that’s the cartoon we’re going to use during click open and that’s going to upload that cartoon and we can add a description here if we want I’m not going to do that and press done and there is our image.

We can add a caption below it, again image description, we can make it a clickable link if you had this image say on your blog or on your website, when people clicked out in their newsletter it would be a way to get them over to your website. So we can also increase the size here… The maximum dimension for this particular template is 400 wide but you can go all sorts of different dimensions and it keeps the block so it keeps the dimensions correct and you also align it left, right or center. So, we’re going to go, we’ll go 350-ish here and we’ll insert that image. You could also change the size right in here so there you could see like before there wasn’t a whole lot of text that we can put over on that left side but now we can resize it and that looks very nice indeed. If you wanted to take up the entire width you can go to fit to block and that will fill up the whole work there. Really easy to do, of course you do want to remember to click save, now we are going to click save and that block in our newsletter is done, we have a great cartoon there and I’m sure people would enjoy reading that and then the article immediately below it. So, real easy, that’s Constant Contact, that’s adding a cartoon to our newsletter there.

Alright. Let’s go to AWeber. We’re going to do a new HTML message here, wait for that to load, let’s see which one should we do, this Leaf Wiggle looks nice, we’ll do this one, okay. Here comes our preformatted newsletter oh that’s very nice and again similar to Constant Contact they have a place all ready for us to add our image. So, we are going to double click on that and then we don’t have images again here in our library so we are going to upload a file. We will get that same cartoon and we are uploading it and there it is. We will change the size, you can see it’s pixelated a little bit but that’s because we are using the thumbnail, if you click original that will get us to the original size and then we can resize that at a good quality there, so you can see that looks very nice and we could align it center or right or left again we can put it in the link there is alt text for SEO and we will just click out of there and that looks very nice in that article indeed I think people would enjoy seeing that there and that’s pretty easy. So, you can see it’s very similar between the programs in fact we will go over here to MailChimp now.

And again very similar. We’re going to click in this block of text here to our Generitech customers and click at it. And we’re going to put this in between these two paragraphs and then we’re going to go to file manager, I think I already have this image, yes I do, I already have this image because I use MailChimp, I already had this in my library and again we’re going to keep these proportions, we’ll keep it at the size that it is originally but you can change that. You can align it left or right or text URL these are all very standard things, I’d like clicking opening a new window if I’m going to have the URL because that keeps your other window open. So, we’re going to save and insert image and you can see it’s showing us that are put it right in there and we’re going to go up back up here and click save now and doesn’t that look nice, right to our Generitech customers. They will have a nice message from us and a funny cartoon to keep them entertained and informed and opening their email newsletters from us every month.

So there it is, it’s very simple to add a cartoon to your email newsletter, people love them, they are great for encouraging people to open and read them and keep coming back. If people know there is a cartoon in your newsletter there is a much better chance they are going to open that because they want to see the funny cartoon again this month. People love to share cartoons, people love to send them to their friends, isn’t this funny, it’s a great way to give your email newsletter and even greater reach than you expect it.

So, that’s it. I hope that you enjoyed it and please visit andertoons.com where you can purchase cartoons individually or you can subscribe to a monthly subscription of cartoons, there’s a couple of different plans there and you can use all of the cartoons you want for email newsletters, presentations and what have you. So thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it.
 

Inking Cartoons – Video

andertoons

Video Transcription –

Hello, this is Mark Anderson from Andertoons.com and I am going to show you how I ink my cartoons. We are going to do two different cartoons here in about eight minutes. I generally ink pretty quickly – oh there is my big giant hand – but I first, let me, my hand is really big and I work really small, so what I am going to do in this video is draw a little bit, pull my hand back so that you can see what I’ve done and as I move right and down it is going to be easier to actually see the inking as it goes, so just hang in there with me, it’s going to get better and you are going to be able to see more as I draw a little bit more, but I apologize for my big gigantic hand.

So we are doing two cartoons, we have a sales cartoon, you can see the sales graph there in the background and then about halfway through that then we are going to do another cartoon that is a lawyer cartoon with a dog, which is always fun, dog cartoons are fun.

So I start with a pencil sketch, you can – I am working on a light desk on my drafting table, I’ve got a really thin light desk that I like a lot and I am able to move it around fairly well. So what I do is I take the pencil sketch and I tape it to the back of the piece of paper that I am going to be using. I use Borden & Riley bleed-proof paper for pens and the pen I am using is a – in fact I have one right in front of me here – it is a Faber-Castell, Faber-Castell, something like that, Pitt artist brush pen; I really like these, I like the variances in line that I can get and I can work pretty fast – oh that guy is surprised, hello.

So that’s what I use and as I said I work pretty small, this cartoon is probably somewhere between 3 x 5 or 4 x 6. And there I am drawing the conference room table and I realized that I forgot to do the projector – something needs to be projecting that, I was getting – but I didn’t have it in my pencil sketch and rather than stop and go back and sketch it in, I just decided I’ve drawn a lot of these things so I just drew it in right there real quick, its not a big deal, its just a little box. I had toyed with the idea of saying, well it’s an overhead projector in the back that you can’t see, but I thought, no you really need to be able to see the projector putting that up on the screen, so just tossed it in there.

I move pretty fast when I ink, I know other cartoonists will pencil very carefully, I know other cartoonists who don’t pencil at all who just ink until they get it, which is really nice, I can’t do that that’s not how I work. I am using a pen to put in the sales text and that little point on the arrow there at the end, put a little thing. Few things here on the projector and I will use it to write in my signature and my caption. But yeah I really – I feel most comfortable using a sketch and inking off of that, I think the thing to be careful of when you do that is that you don’t worry too much about getting it to look exactly like the sketch, the sketch is an outline and when I am inking, and this is going to sound like an odd combination but it’s sort of a studied carelessness, you want that ink line to really look like you just dashed it off, you just threw it on the page and because – if you go really slow, oops the new cartoon, if you go really slow that line is just going to die right on the page – that’s an earlier ink that I had done that I got like two or three problems right away so I just started over.

So here I am starting on the dog lawyer cartoon. So yeah when I am inking I really try to make sure that it just looks dashed off, I am not really worried about getting all the lines exactly right, I am not – little mistakes, I will even put a little mark on the final art to fix it in Photoshop and I will make a little error and off course that will all get fixed, but even then I only use Photoshop for – if I really like 95% of the drawing and there is one glaring error that I need to fix I will do that, but even little errors I like, I like little things where the line goes too far or well that hand looks more like a squiggle than a hand, I am okay with that because I think that’s, it feels real and authentic and organic and I just like that feel.

So we are about five minutes into the video, we’ve got like two or three minutes left to go, but you can see I am already on the second cartoon, this is a dog at a lawyer and he is talking to the lawyer, the lawyer has his hands folded there. That was the part that sort of tripped me up on the first one, was those lawyer’s hands folded like that, I really wanted him to look like he was sitting back in the chair considering this carefully.

That first cartoon I was talking – the caption on it was – there is a sales graph and the sales graph goes up, down, up and then it goes way down, then you see like three bouncy lines and the caption is something like, ‘wow, I’ve never seen it bounce like that’, the idea that the line picked up so much momentum on the way down that when it hit the bottom of the sale graph that it actually bounced a little bit. This one the wording is trickier, and I don’t ever refer to me so I am trying to read it sideways now as I am watching this.

It is something about, ‘I will take your case, but I need to know everything. Mailman’ – oh what was it, mailman, boy I can’t read that, oh I am so sorry. Mailman, hydrants that’s the other thing and chew toys with a grudge, everything, the idea that if he is going to take this dog’s case that there can’t be any surprises. I thought of this while I was out walking one morning with my coffee and I was thinking about dogs and chew toys and I just really liked the idea that a chew toy would really hold a grudge and that phrase, those couple of words, ‘chew toy with a grudge’ made me, I actually laughed out loud on my walk, it’s like 6:30 in the morning and I walking down the sidewalk with my orange cup of coffee and I am laughing while I am listening to my iPod about this chew toy and I am sure, I guarantee there is someone on the other side of the street looking at me like I am a loon, ‘oh it’s one of those people’, no it is just your friendly neighborhood cartoonist, Mark Anderson, Andertoons.com.

So we are finishing up here, there are the books in the background to denote the lawyer’s office and that looks pretty good. If I were this lawyer I might take this dog’s case. You know what he looks like he got a bum rap there. That lawyer is missing an ear though, he has no ear and no hair, I think I put that back in. There I am writing in the caption so that I don’t forget it, so. And I don’t want to forget too, please visit Andertoons.com, there is thousands and thousands of cartoons on all kinds of topics, including dogs and lawyers and sales graphs and other things, so…

I hope you enjoyed watching me ink and I hope you have learnt something and enjoyed my ramblings. I am hoping you enjoyed them more than the person across the street from me when I was thinking of this. I probably sound more coherent coming from a video like this than across the street shambling along with my coffee. Hup, here comes the ear and the hair, hurray for me.

Alright, have a great day, thanks for watching. Visit Andertoons.com and have a good day.