CCS Illustrations - Part 2: One-Week Cartooning Workout Spots

Another big project that I developed for The Center for Cartoon Studies in my new job as Director of Academic Outreach was a free email course called the One-Week Cartooning Workout.  The idea is that you enter your email address and then for the next week you get one email a day filled with tips, tricks, an exercise, and links to various examples and resources.  I created the first draft and turned it over to CCS Director James Sturm, who tightened things up, and then I created some spot illustrations to bring it all together.

Since the idea was a cartooning workout, where you are building skills with small exercises, I decided to build the imagery around the idea of those cheesy workout videos from the '80s and '90s.  My wife is a big fan of the Found Footage Festival - we have DVDs and books that they've released and she and I have even attended some of their live screenings - so I was familiar with their amazing montages of various different workout videos.

When it came time to design the logo however, I looked back to a vinyl workout record I had listened to a bunch as a kid, Mousercise.  Using this style, I shifted all the colors to pure Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, and incorporated linescreen dots, to reinforce the traditional printing process that comics have used for generations.

One I had the logo designed, I used a similar type treatment for each day's banner.  I also reenlisted CCS's founder Inky Solomon and his faithful dog Panels and put them in a variety of situations that act as visual puns, combining the tools and language of cartooning and the various activities and gear used in an exercise workout.

For the Day Eight email (spoiler alert: there is a Day Eight email!), I included at least one element from each of the other seven spot illustrations and then had a role reversal of Panels the dog being super buff after Inky has done all the training.

You can sign up for the One-Week Cartooning Workout at any time and it is absolutely free.  If you're looking for some prompts to help you get the ball rolling on your cartooning, it's worth checking out!

CCS Illustrations - Part 1: Academic Outreach

In 2016, after eight years teaching on the faculty in a variety of courses, I started a new job at The Center for Cartoon Studies, as their Director of Academic Outreach.  It is a fun, challenging job in which I try to help prospective students find out about the school in a variety of ways.

Since it is a new position and I have been creating a lot of new programs (with the help of the rest of the CCS administrative team!) there have been a lot of opportunities to create illustrations to communicate these new ideas. I thought I would write a few posts to feature some of this work.

Academic Outreach Homepage

One of the main aspects of my job is skyping into college comics classrooms or student-run comics clubs as a visiting artist.  It is free for the hosting school (CCS pays my fee) and as a trade, I start with a 10-minute slideshow about CCS, and then give a lecture about a variety of comics topics for the rest of an hour.  

I created the spot illustrations below to get across this idea, which were used on the Academic Outreach Homepage, on the CCS homepage, and on CCS's social media (Instagram, Twitter).

For the vertical banner, I used CCS's "Telegraph Building" which is one of three buildings that comprise the CCS campus.

The Colodony Surprise Department store has been featured in countless CCS promotional materials, because for the first few years the entire school was run out of that one building.  The Post Office Building, which was purchased in 2010 is now home to the Schulz Library and is where most of the day-to-day instruction happens, so it has been featured in various promotional materials as well.

But to my knowledge, CCS has never featured the Telegraph Building, which is home to senior studio space, the A/V room (where Jon Chad and I used to house our pinball machines!), off-site library storage, and some original art storage.  It actually used to be the communications hub where the Upper Valley communicated by telegraph and telephone.  It is now connected to a giant internet building owned by the local tel-com company.  I took some artistic license, adding satellite dishes on top, to boost its signal.

CCS Awareness Day

Each year CCS has an "awareness day" where we try to get alumni to all go on social media on the same day to talk about their positive experiences at CCS.  There is no advertising budget for CCS, so it's a great way to increase our visibility.  I created the spot illustration below for the 2017 campaign, which features CCS's founder, Inky Solomon, and his dog, Panels, who are the cartoon mascots for the school.

CCS Info Sessions

Another part of my job is setting up "Info Session" events at various cities around the USA where local folks interested in CCS can learn about the school and hear a free comics lecture.  I create flyers for the events which can be shared online, or printed out as flyers to be handed out at the venue.  Here are two (with some reused elements) for events I hosted in Los Angeles and Albuquerque.

Portfolio Reviews

Since beginning my new job as Director of Academic Outreach, I now often represent CCS when I am tabling at comics conventions.  Here is an illustration I created to promote free portfolio reviews that I was giving at Short Run in 2018.  I designed this so that it is easy to reuse, simply by swapping out the show information in the lower right-hand corner.

Coffee Shop Meetups

In the Fall of 2018 I headed up a new initiative called CCS Coffee Shop Meetups.  I coordinated thirteen different meetups, hosted by CCS alumni and past-fellows, scattered around the country (and abroad!). Below is the branding image for the initiative, and then each of the thirteen events had its own flyer and social media posts, which followed the same format seen below for my event that was out here in Santa Fe, NM.

If any of these types of events sound like something you are interested in setting up, or participating in, feel free to drop me a line!  :)  outreach "AT" cartoonstudies "DOT" org

Believe it or not, I have two more posts planned with more illustration work that I have created for CCS since starting my new job there in 2016!

2014 Recap: Slate Book Review - Part 2

Last week I posted the banner and first three illustrations that I did for the Slate Book Review in October 2014.  Below are the final pieces that I created for this assignment.

Please note that all of the illustrations in this post were first published in Slate™ Magazine www.slate.com (I'm required to say that!)  Also, while I'm at it, if you click on any of the pictures below, you'll be able to see them a bit bigger.

The fourth piece I did was all about vaccines, which involve needles, which I am terrified of!  This illustration has two inside-jokes: 1) the doctor looks like my dad, who is a doctor! 2) one of the things that really helped me meet this tight deadline was the release of Weezer's new album Everything Will Be Alright In The End.  As I was working on these, it was released on iTunes as a sneak peak, and I was pretty much streaming it non-stop while working on these illustrations... How is your eyesight?  :)

Vaccine as Metaphor by Mark O'Connell

The fifth piece was about this new book of poetry by Claudia Rankine which she wrote in the second person.  It's all about racist interactions, but because it uses the pronoun "you," the reader experiences the racism first hand, even if they are not a person of color.  I tried to get this across by having the word "YOU" changing the head of a white guy to that of a black lady, Rankine herself!

Blackness Visible by Jonathan Farmer

The sixth piece was about a series of murder mystery books that take place in Dublin, Ireland. The article referenced a lot of different locations around Dublin, so I found some photos for each of them and drew them inside some "house" icons and laid it over the Irish flag.  Ta-da!  Conceptual.

Safe as Houses by Tammy Oler

The seventh piece was about a new novel that filmmaker David Cronenberg wrote.  I have never seen a David Cronenberg movie (too scary/gory for my taste) so I was having a hard time with this one.  The final idea was flat-out handed to me by my awesome art director at Slate, Dan Kois.  He said, "find a screenshot of this scene from this movie, but make the TV screen a book."  I had no frame of reference for what this image meant, but I was working on it behind my table at the Alternative Press Expo when my pal Liz Prince looked over my shoulder and said, "Wow, that's a really clever idea." I wish I could take credit for it!  Thanks, Dan.

Bibliodrome by Karina Longworth

So just to review, thus far the themes of my Slate illustration had been: suicide, the great depression, the holocaust, disease, racism, murder and horror movies.  As I mentioned last week, this is not the neighborhood of illustration that I normally hang out in - serious stuff!  Also, something about having to do all of these in a single ten-day stretch was putting me in a dark mind space.

So it was a great relief when the last piece turned out to be about the pleasure of reading plays.  As an undergrad theatre major, I agreed whole-heartedly with the article, and I had a lot of fun looking up reference photos for the lighting instruments and the cover design of those ubiquitous Samuel French manuscripts.     

Yes More Drama by Dan Kois

All in all, this assignment was a lot of fun.  It was a pleasure working with a great art director, and I definitely got to stretch my illustration muscles a bit, exploring some new territory.  All that being said, it was also nice to come back to some simple, happy work for children after this series of dark illustrations!

Next week I'm going to start posting some of the work I did for Highlights in 2014.

2014 Recap: Slate Book Review - Part 1

Last September I was contacted by Dan Kois, the culture editor at Slate.com who wanted to know if I would be interested in drawing some illustrations for the October Slate Book Review.  The pay was not great, and the turnaround was crazy (9 illustrations in 10 days!!?!) but they promised to post a review of my graphic novel, Basewood and it sounded like an interesting challenge to me.  I don't do a lot of serious, editorial illustration, because usually I'm working on projects for children, so I thought it would be a good learning experience for me.  It was!

Please note that all of the illustrations in this post were first published in Slate™ Magazine www.slate.com (I'm required to say that!)  Also, while I'm at it, if you click on any of the pictures below, you'll be able to see them a bit bigger.

First up was a banner for the Slate Book Review landing page.  Since these illustrations would run in October, I thought of curling up with a good book inside while it is raining outside (I grew up in Seattle, if you can't tell).  I also tried to hint at a Halloween theme, with a stack of orange books making a pumpkin shape.  I threw in a black cat for good measure!

Above is the version I turned in, though "Slate Book Review" was added on the left side in yellow.  You can see the finished banner as well as all of the other Slate Book Review banners (along with the impressive list of other cartoonists and illustrators who have tackled this assignment!) on this Slate Book Review archive page.

Next, Dan started sending me the articles that I needed to illustrate, one by one.  I have to say, it was pretty weird!  The articles are reviews of books, but there wasn't actually time for me to read the books.  So I had to make an illustration that sums up a book that I hadn't read!  The first book was Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle.  I read the article I was given, but then I also looked at the book's cover design and then read peoples' reviews of it on Amazon and Goodreads to try and figure out some of the themes of the story.  That became my practice for all of these books.  I was having a hard time wrapping my head around this first illustration, until Dan suggested I put my composition inside a maze.  It really clicked after that!

"No Child Has Ever Been Harmed by Music" by Carl Wilson

I don't want to post any spoilers, but if you have read this book, you'll know that I had to do some pretty gruesome image research to figure out this drawing.  It was the first time, but not the last, during this assignment that I had to look at some really horrific visual reference, which I have not been able to forget.


Thankfully the second illustration was much more tame.  Unlike most of the illustrations I work on, the goal with these was to go more conceptual.  It was not enough to just depict scenes from the book, I had to find some theme to represent visually.  In this case it was contrasting the dust clouds of the great depression with the clouds of heaven.

Likeness of Wings by Marian Ryan

The third piece I did was all about Auschwitz, which, again, lead to some really horrific visual reference.  Based on the article, the idea I came up with was to contrast really cartoony characters with a more naturalistic environment.  Since the whole concept hinged on the idea of two different styles between the characters and the background, I enlisted the help of my extremely talented wife, Claire Sanders, to paint the background, based on a composition I whipped together in photoshop from various reference photos.  This also had the added benefit of saving me some time during this extremely tight deadline.  Thanks Claire!

Martin Amis' Zones of Interest by Mark O'Connell

Well, this post is getting a bit long, so next week I'll post the other five illustrations that I did for this assignment, as I continue to post work that I did in 2014.

Joan of Arc Spot

I'm pretty sure this was my first ever published illustration.  It was drawn for The Zinester's Guide to Portland.  I was living in Portland at the time, and I remember I biked down to draw this sculpture in person.  I had a horrible bike wreck on my way there - flipped over my handlebars, bent my front wheel in half - so this was drawn while I was bloody and bruised.  That might be why it never occurred to me that Joan of Arc is supposed to be carrying a flag in this sculpture.  I guess it was being repaired or something on the day that I drew it.  Oh well, what you see here is what made it into the book!

I am posting this old work to get it back online after I stopped using Flickr to display my illustration work.

Fall of Autumn Clip Art

Back in 2006 I was asked to create some clip-art for the now defunct zine distributor Fall of Autumn.  I created a bunch of tiny spot illustrations trying to focus on various aspects of the zinester lifestyle.  There are a lot of little nods to some of my zinester friends hidden in these images.  Click on any of the images below to see a bigger version.

I am posting this old work to get it back online after I stopped using Flickr to display my illustration work.

Organization Chapter Illustration

Well, here is proof once and for all that I'm done with my Harry Potter Drawings, a completely non-magical illustration! This drawing will be a chapter heading for the new edition of Make a Zine! which is being published by Microcosm Publishing.

Microcosm is a great collective of people who publish and distribute zines and minicomics. They have long carried my Phase 7 Comics and recently they have started publishing comics collections by many of my favorite cartoonists (and FRIENDS!) Make a Zine! will be an invaluable resource and everyone should check it out. I have often said that in my ideal world, EVERYONE would make their own zine. Find something you care about and show it to the world! You will find others with similar interests and it never hurts having more friends!

I've got a really cool post for next week, but you'll have to wait to see it. Thanks for checking in!