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Showing posts from November, 2017

Repeat Business

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NO, THE TITLE ABOVE is NOT a reference to any trip to Amsterdam I may have considered, but more of a depiction of how more work can generate from the same customer[s] if your cartoons are deemed good enough. LAST POSTING, I added in fairly sketchy-but-acceptable 'office toons'  but to be honest, I much prefer doing more accomplished work that clearly takes considerably longer, here of course it all depends on the payment of the job making it worthwhile to embark upon. I have done a fair few of these works now, with more similar themes in the pipeline.  DIGITAL TOMFOOLERY:  this is normally a good thing now I have got the hang of it, but one drawback here is the loss of fine detail in some of the scaled-down, shrunken elements---the cartoonist has to balance all this to avoid work that will not be perceptible to the viewer, it is all about thinking ahead. RAB L RAUSER 

OfficeToons in Practicality

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THESE EFFORTS ILLUSTRATED BELOW  are a few examples of relatively frequent 'office-based' cartoon jobs I pick up, often a handful of different assignments each year. Office workers get in touch and describe what they want drawn up, often with accompanying photos of staff etc--- THIS ASSIGNMENT HERE was quite different though: the budget was modest here so I offered the team leader 'one deluxe cartoon or three basic simplistic ones'. She chose 'three quickies'    {a 'quickie' is often  a lot better than nothing, readers] which accounts for the sketchier-than-usual finish seen here. The amount of time I spend on a cartoon sometimes depends on how much I am being paid---it all depends. Ideally I like to spend enough time getting a nice result but practicalities often rear their ugly head. The buyer seemed happy, though. That's often the most important aspect of doing this. RAB L RAUSER 

RainDroppin'

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YET ANOTHER 'new' DIVERSION and further proof I can adapt at will to most forms of cartooning if I really set my mind to it,  ---this one was a competition I won to design story-book characters for a kids' fiction book. AGAIN, I am fairly happy to draw this sort of thing, just so long as I am allowed to draw the way I want without having to consult existing imagery [I usually turn these down unless I really need to pay the bills!] : the customer said my rough drafts showed more 'life' and imagination than other, more computer-generated submissions for the task  [IMPORTANT:   I generate a fair bit of work simply by showing very quick pen-on-paper sketches, and that was the case here] Nice simplistic stuff, and it is often more of an actual challenge to put over effective characterization within the confines of deliberately fewer lines. I ADMIT I AM ONE OF THOSE CARTOONISTS WHO TRIES TO IMPRESS WITH DRAWING TECHNIQUE ALONE: however there is a helluva lot to be said fo

POLITICOS

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IN STARK CONTRAST to the highly-commercial 'cleaning consumer '   advertising piece illustrated last posting, here we see the absolute other side of the coin, readers, controversial material, including DELIBERATE RACIAL STEREOTYPING as well as FOUL LANGUAGE. FOUL LANGUAGE: --------- in everyday life, I try and avoid the use of deliberate strong swear-words [it is too overdone these days, all over the TV, so I hear] unless there is a valid reason [hitting my thumb with the hammer during DIY, or encountering total real-life prats] and as far as my cartoons go, I steer clear of 'corrupting' my cartoon imagery with this sort of thing. HOWEVER! ----------- An increasing amount of my recent and current material arrives in the form of commissions, in other words folks with ideas but little drawing skills, in search of folks like me. If someone is going to PAY ME to put in strong language, I will do it, after taking the context of the idea into consideration. RACIAL STEROTYPING

Back in Action

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SORRY READERS the site was closed down for almost four months but here we are again I have been really busy this year happily, easily the busiest I have been as a cartoonist since I worked in animation in the early 90s The good news is I am getting a constant stream of work coming in, which runs the gamut from savage political cartoons through to very commercial material like this sucker seen below. I will start adding in some examples of  this material over the next weeks running up until Christmas 2017 A lot I am unable to show until after publication, of course. First up, here we see an extremely commercial job I done for a small company. A rare case of me adapting material from existing designs the customer [sorry, 'client' sounds far too pretentious]  stated they liked. a rare example of me putting in colored persons, a theme I avoid left to my own devices, due to the over-analysed controversy attached to this aspect of depicting such folks. RAB L RAUSER

beer barmaid directions

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YESTERDAY  (LOCAL TIME FOR ROB: SAT 12:35 PM) Hi Rob. What you describe sounds good -- let's do it. For the scenes, we're fairly open to whatever you envision as Oktoberfest-y, but we have a couple of asks. -The first three would be scenes with different bartenders pouring beers. Maybe one or two could be the stereotypical cute female bar server (maybe one younger, one a little older), and the third could be a traditional looking guy with a beard. Just a few thoughts ... but we're open to suggestions. Each bar/bartender should be serving one of three colors: light (lager); medium (amber); dark (stout). Sort of like three different beer tents. So, the beers should be in glasses so the color/style can be seen (even though I really like the old-fashioned pewter mugs!) -The fourth would be a scene with a table of men/women people drinking varieties of beers. The beers can be mixed and in any type of mug here. -The last would be a closeup of a server (maybe this one a young guy,