I enjoyed this slickly-produced profile of Winnipeg’s Chris Chuckry, the founder of the comic book colouring firm FrogRocket.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Canadian, Chris Chuckry, colouring, Comics, Obama, video, Winnipeg

JabJab’s latest original music video, He’s Barack Obama, which premiered at the White House Radio & Television Correspondents Dinner this week, is my favourite yet.

I visited the JibJab studios last month, and everyone was hard at work putting the finishing touches on this piece. It was great fun to see all the work in progress, and bless their hearts, the JibJab team has put all of it on their production blog.

Anyone interested in how these sorts of things are put together owes it to themselves to check it out — they cover the initial writing process, scratch music tracks, character designs, rough storyboards, and the production of all the design and animation. Don’t miss the unused stop motion sequence.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 4 comments
Tags: Animation, Obama, politics, process, video

Enjoy. (via Cartoon Brew)

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 3 comments
Tags: Animation, Michael Schlingmann, Obama, video

Interesting interview with Sol Sender, who led a design team for the Obama 08 logo, about decisions that went into the design process.

“There was an idea of unity that emerged, particularly when we began to look at the red and blue, and how they intersected.”

Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Design, logos, Obama, politics

Richard T just pointed me towards this fantastic image by Patrick Moberg, who does some real fun pixelly stuff.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: Illustration, Obama, Patrick Moberg, politics

It’s still several hours before any results pour in for the U.S. presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped editorial cartoonists from making predictions and readying their submissions. Daryl Cagle’s online hub of editorial cartoons has already started compiling cartoons depicting Obama’s victory.

MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond also recently posted a look at MAD’s efforts to not predict election results, but to prepare two versions of features or cover art that feature a winning presidential candidate.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 2 comments
Tags: america, Cartooning, Daryl Cagle, editorial cartooning, MAD Magazine, Obama, politics, tom richmond

I guess if there’s any proof to the far right’s claim that Barack Obama is a socialist it’s that his face is on more t-shirts than Che Guevara these days. The Art of Obama blog aims to document the outpouring of artwork inspired by Obama’s message of hope and change, and his image itself.

There are some hits and misses, but I was struck by the elegance of this wire sculpture entitled Tension by artist Michael Murphy.

Related:
Build-O-Bama
Tile Your Walls with Obama
Artists for Barack Obama
Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: america, Art, Obama, politics

An ad agency working on the Obama campaign called me a few weeks ago. They saw my drawings over words and my drawing with words posted here and asked if I would be interested in doing a drawing for a campaign poster. They wanted a portrait of Barack Obama made from a list of issues most important to the Senator written out to form the portrait. I employed this technique once before when I was so frustrated with the media coverage I thought it an appropriate way to show the subtext. But that drawing was done for this blog rather quickly and designed to be seen 6 inches at 72 ppi (pixels per square inch) this would be viewed much larger and needed to be much more detailed. That means many many more words,.. so many in fact, that at 72 ppi, I could only show a small fraction of the drawing here, otherwise it wouldn’t read as words.

Over the next few days I’m going to post the rest of the drawing in fragments. If you’re a college student and you print the fragments out, tile them together on your dorm room wall and send me a picture, I’ll give you a shout out and post the pics here on my blog.

Here’s a link to all the pieces for you to print out.

Previously:
The news on the news: Larry Roibal

Related posts:
Artists for Barack Obama
Shepard Fairey’s Obama Poster

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Larry Roibal, lettering, Obama, politics, Typography

At least two illustrators are defending The New Yorker’s willingness to keep imagemaking relevant and thought-provoking. The indefatigable DB Dowd (previously) – who brought this dust-up to my attention – has an excellent essay about it, while Person-of-the-Day caricaturist Steve Brodner has a call-to-action on his Drawger blog.

Now if only The New Yorker would stop being wimps and post about this on their new Cartoon Lounge blog, and put in message threads!! THAT would make their new blog something to bookmark, a place to regularly discuss freedom-of-sight. Instead, they are conducting all the juicy discussion over on The  Huffington Post.

Posted by Jaleen Grove on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 27 comments
Tags: america, Barry Blitt, editorial cartooning, New Yorker, Obama, politics, scandal

With a simple ballpoint pen, Larry Roibal doodles quick, yet consummate portraits of faces from current events — all on the pages of the newspaper itself.

(Thanks, Leif!)

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | 7 comments
Tags: ballpoint pen, Drawing, Larry Roibal, Obama, politics