Evolution of a magazine cartoon -

This second drawing here is a tracing using my light table built into my drawing board . . . I used first an HB pencil and then finally using a Sharpie fine point I keep making corrections so I can see the important new lines as the drawing begins to come alive . . slowly at first . . .     but you can feel it and all the time in your mind it is slowly becoming clearer and more focused . . . you slowly get a feeling that everything is going to be all right . . .

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I will attempt here to show how a cartoon rough evolves from nothing to a completely finished cartoon ready to make a New Yorker editor or some other lucky editor's chops drool. 

I'm serious, I like to approach every cartoon this way . . . almost as if In KNOW the editor is going to purchase it . . .   I see it beginning to take shape. . . once the idea has been finalized with the actual wording, or close to the final wording . . at least to the point that you are excited to begin drawing it up . . .   the adrenelin begins to flow as you place and tape your bond paper to your board.

At this point, the excitement begins to grab a hold of me and every minute from here on until the final drawing will continuously become better focused . . . maybe a little Mozart today softly in the background . . . 

The very first thing I do is make at least one or two freehand quicky thumbnails about 3x4 inches from different angles, in this case it had to be a front view because of all the elements involved and therefore I wanted to make it easy to read in a continuous flow telling the story all along . . .

What you see here in the first drawing on bond paper with a soft pencil is the scene that has been in my mind ever since I first began to draw it up.

Like Woody Allen said: " 90% is just showing up. "

And in this business, " 90% is beginning to draw the project. "

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THIS drawing below actually was the first sketch . . . after the thumbnails.

You just dive in, unafraid, knowing that the end point will be exactly what you wanted . . . and because you are not afraid to make mistakes . . . and you KNOW you have plenty of erasers and plenty of paper and plenty of time . . .

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This is the third and final black and white drawing that I will use to now start working in color . . .

Now you have a clean tracing again of your project and after a couple of times tracing this drawing again,you continue to trace it till it is just right.  In this case because of so many elements I had to draw as large as possible . . . in fact, I drew Steve Jobs at the podium on a separate piece of paper and reduced it and pasted it in position . . .

Next, I Googled up images of all the logos and pieces of equipment I would need and I printed and pasted copies in the appropriate sizes and places in the drawing to tell the story . . .

The next drawing you will see the final drawing !

And here is the final drawing. . . . For the crowd scene audience, I just drew about 6 or 7 people and then with the clone tool on the program I was able to drop in the duplicate pieces of the crowd wherever I wanted to . . by making a few changes in the arms, etc., you can create the illusion that the crowd was drawn all at once . . .  then a little clean up all over  the drawing, touching it up here and there . . . and all the time coloring it, tweaking it, etc. 

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Most drawings are not this complicated or I would have gone out of here like Ernest Hemingway . . .

  When I finish one like this, I sometimes mumble to myself the words of the late great Martin Luther King Jr.,

" Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last ! "