polarized double

THIS SITE has somewhat devolved away from it's origins: a showcase for the development of my BABY BOOMER cast of characters, and more recently priority has been given over to commercial artworks done within the last weeks and months. SO!!!! ------ Here is a 'De Luxe' polished version of most of the Regular Cast, just finished by me today. Again, this image emphasises my tendency to gravitate more towards 'Personality'-  based imagery, a quite different approach from gag-heavy material, which is more often the choice of most cartoonists. I like to do a bit of both---personality AND gag-orientated stuff, and ideally a combination of both in the same work is a good standard to aim for. this sucker here is most certainly personality-based, however. RAB L RAUSER

MY FIRST CARICATURE WORK OF 2017, I usually only do a couple of these per year. This one was another' out-of-the-blue'  commission from an interested party who happily liked my stuff and got in touch. Detailed and full of incident, which is JUST how I like it! BELOW: See how I put these suckers together like a giant jigsaw: it may look a bit daunting to the uninitiated, but it is all about pre-visualization, which I have thankfully never had a problem with. SEE ALSO BELOW: Hithero unseen, revealed here is my technique for adding thumbnail pictures and color references as shrunken photos, which are very handy for reference/ accuracy: the way I do it saves me having to open up multiple 'windows' on the image manipulation program. The only drawback with this cartoon is my dogged insistence on drawing an attractive blonde nurse that looks far too much a similar character in CUDDLES and DIMPLES [DANDY]: Barrie Appleby was the only real master of drawing delightful cartoon

THIS ONE represents my first sale to a UK customer of recent times , and even here I think the buyer was an ex-US Marine [I was paid in Dollars, which I have to convert] THIS CARTOON represents an interesting dilemma: I regard the concept of WAR   as basic human Madness: so , does my promotion of Military Combat-like imagery like seen here [albeit in a deliberate  fantasy setting] mark me out as something of a hypocrite? Well, my critics have a point, this is a very gung-ho image, however fun it was to dream up on my part. The ex-Marine seemed a nice chap and very civilized to deal with: what he got up to in the theatre of War is his business and as long as he was involved in protecting civilians, all is fine. This baby is intended for T-Shirt reproduction, and as such is deliberately pretty streamlined. Also features the early concept sketches, which won me this job. RAB L RAUSER

A BUNCH OF SNOBBY-acting , apparently  sour-faced misery-guts that made up some of the most selfish members on a petty-evil  forum I used to be on sometimes indicated that my cartoons were 'not funny enough to sell' however a quick backtrack through this site will reveal I CAN actually turn my hand to very commercial material that pays,  if the opportunity arises. True, I much prefer just drawing the way I feel like----- what artist DOESN'T?------ however sometimes the discipline of trying out something that 'has to be done in a certain way' can be well worthwhile----more on this later, I am actually doing stuff along this train-of-thought right now. The commercial material I probably enjoy more is when the buyer specifies something 'a bit more off-the-beaten track', which was the case here. BELOW: My display for a VAPE shop in Estonia that is apparently getting the punters in. PHOTOS via camera-phone--I have never actually seen this shop---but here we get e

OR:  INTERGLOBAL, INC, Part 3 I previously stated I all but gave up on the British Comics Market, ---or perhaps it gave up on me!---and in any case, I felt standards in the UK funnies market had, in the main, plummeted badly since the 80s, although a decent few artists like Ken Harrison stuck to their insistence on quality , going very much against the grain of the General status quo, which in my view got pretty dire over the past 30 plus years. NO MATTER! -------THE INTERNET proves conclusively there is still opportunities for Comic-strip artists around the Planet, and who would have guessed that my first fully-fledged strip [ outside of advertising] would have been struck for the ARABIC MARKET?: I once boldly stated I would never put overseas characters into my cartoons and here you see me backtracking on my word -----------

MORE EXAMPLES AND ILLUSTRATIONS of how my cartoon artwork is finding an outlet in the overseas market. Here is a very stylized, 'edgy'-looking 'living showboat' done for an ESTONIAN customer  just recently:  the criteria here was a cartoon 'not especially for kids, something a bit more left-field'. This one took a few rough drafts due to the fact I can't recall ever drawing a SHOWBOAT ever previously, before this: somewhat unusually for me, this was a GOOGLE IMAGES consultation job as regards looking at pictures of real showboats. Here we have the finished artwork in  various stages, including some early proto-roughs, as well as a look at the finished design-logo as it exists over in central Europa. See also how the very early concept try-outs looked too much like a smaller tugboat, and how it sometimes takes a few tries to get a design looking 'right'. RAB L RAUSER

THE OPPORTUNITIES for finding work as a cartoonist has been transformed forever through the advent of the Internet: I myself found it increasingly difficult to find anything via traditional publishing at one time, in fact I stopped submitting anywhere---although I never, ever stopped drawing and 'advancing' ---for quite a long time. At one point during my late 30s, I lost interest in comics and mags anyway, I was not all that struck in the general direction they were heading: I am more of an 'old school' cartoonist in the way I approach these drawings. THE INTERNET means my material has the potential to be seen anywhere on the Planet by anyone with a computer and as such, I get many enquiries out of the blue from parties interested in using my drawings for commercial purposes....almost all of these derive from overseas and I cannot quite remember the last time I drew anything for a British customer--it has probably been a few years. Most of these customers come a-chappi

HERE IS THE COMPLETED tribute I done to Fleischers' 1930s animated cartoon Popeye the Sailor, the subject that kindled and kick-started my interst in drawing cartoons, which has never been extinguished. For a long time, it was very difficult to get a hold of decent prints of the original [and easily the best]----Popeye short subjects put out between 1933 and the War years  on dvd format and I had to get imported copies from the USA around a decade ago--they have still never turned up in the UK stores. Anyway, fantastic cartoon subject in every way, and I am so familiar with this subject I needed absolutely NO reference material for this drawing. I do not enjoy adapting established Properties , but I owe a heckuva lot to Popeye and the least I can do is a drawing like this, in tribute: RAB L RAUSER

COMIC STRIPS: -----this is the medium in which I basically learned my 'craft' during my very early 20s: I got taken on as an apparantly 'promising artist' by British Publishing Giants D C Thomson aged 22: my background before this had been a directionless melee of dead-end jobs and anti-system bile, neither of which made for any real fulfilment in 'what to do with my life'. The British comics market was thriving and vital in my youth: many artists found full-time work due to the healthy amount of quirky, very perochially UK comics put out during the 50s to 70s period especially.  Come the 80s, sales and standards were in obvious freefall, leading to the poor state of what is left of this Industry today: namely THE BEANO which today only sells around 35 000 copies---a fraction of its' 50s heyday, when sale averaged around two Million. Anyway, allowing for my uber-enthusiasm for 'drawing for the comics medium' at a time when it was fast becoming a dyin