I miss magazines.
Hey! New Mad stuff from me in the works, some fun yabbering on reference material, and sketchin' people you've never seen before!
With the prospect of new magazine illustration jobs becoming fewer and farther between, what was once a major part of my (and, dare I say, my illustrator generation’s) marketing focus seems to be becoming more anomalous.
I love working for magazines. Though I was (and am!) always just thrilled to be working for anybody, when I was coming up, I saw magazine work as the pinnacle, something to shoot for, and deep down that never really went away. There was always Mad, but seeing Philip Burke’s caricatures in Rolling Stone helped solidify my opinions on magazine work in general.
It took me a while to get into any sort of groove in the magazine world- being too hyper focused on caricature for caricature’s sake and not having a clue about how to build a portfolio or shop it around didn’t help my case much. What I did have going for me was pure coincidence: it just happened to be the 90s, an era with an abundance of pretty wild caricature illustration in pop culture- magazines in particular. Entertainment Weekly, Time, Rolling Stone- all seemed to encourage their Art Directors to really take some risks and have some fun with their subject matter, giving a spotlight to some really amazing illustrators in the process.
It felt good to be able to open some fluffy movie or TV magazine and see some spot illustration in there of whatever TV show was hot at the moment, drawn by someone who’s work I was familiar with or not, and have that as an achievable, seemingly tangible goal.
What, new Mad content??
Yes, there’s a special election-centric issue of Mad Magazine in the works, one with a bunch of NEW original content, myself included!
For those not in the know, for some time now, Mad has been published bi-monthly (the every other month bi-monthly, not the twice a month bi-monthly. Pipe down, you literal minded optimists!), with mostly reprinted material. There’ll be a new cover, a few pages of new content inside, a new fold-in by Johnny Sampson, and that’s about it. But, now & then, the bean counters at DC comics decide to loosen the belt and allow the staff to do what they do best: actually produce a magazine with new, topical material! Well, 20 pages of new, topical material, anyway, but we’ll take what we can get!
This issue, #40 for the 3 of you only counting the issues since Mad moved to LA, hits the stands October 9. I’ve got a fun piece in this one, m’self, and that’s what I’m on this week! Which leads me to somethin’ else…
Reference material?? I thought you knew how to DRAW!!
A book I refer to all the time is Mark Simon’s Facial Expressions: A Visual Reference for Artists. It’s become pretty standard to see this one on the shelves of various types of artist’s shelves I’ve noticed, and for good reason. It’s just full of…. this:
I’m on a job now that has me drawing a main character who isn’t anybody, but goes through a range of emotions throughout a story. It’d be nearly impossible for me to pull that out of my head- make up a face so precise that I could manipulate it convincingly whatever story had to be told throughout all through his expressions, so…
So, here’s how I start out on the process- I picked out a model from this book who fits the bill…and got to work.
This video is the first chunk of the process. (Usually goes a lot quicker since I’m not usually flapping my gums throughout.) This will go on and on until I’m comfortable enough with this dude’s face that I’m confident I can reproduce it in the expressions/angles/emotions the story calls for. Sometimes it takes a bit.
I’ll document more of the process in the next day or two. Here’s the beginning…