Roid Rage

Happy Monday! What's this? More topical humour? Well this idea came from a simple note and a suggestion merged together. So my friend Allan suggested that I do a cartoon about Lance Armstrong (honestly I hadn't even pondered doing one until he mentioned it), his idea though was to have a bunch of pot smoking hippies riding bikes and someone saying "Damn Lance Armstrong, look what he's started!". Or something like that, which honestly is a good idea, but I kind of wanted to add my own spin to it. So I've been pondering this idea all week, and by coincidence I was looking through one of my notebooks and I found a note that I'd written down which was simply "Hemorrhoid Rage - 'roid Rage" and I thought about merging the ideas and.... boom! 
But if it wasn't for my lovely lady Pen, that note wouldn't have been there in the first place. You see, I had that note randomly scrawled down in another notebook which I'd left in front of my computer one day. She saw it and said that she really liked it, so I then wrote it down in one of my travel notebooks, the same notebook I was then was browsing through yesterday whilst on my lunchbreak at work (of late I've been cramming in some brainstorming whilst eating my lunch in my stupidly short breaks, and honestly they've been very fruitful sessions for some reason, must be the pressure of time restraints). So there are two people who deserve some credit for this cartoon, Alan and Penelope, thanks heaps guys!

Until we meet again!

My Non-Literal, Visual Interpretation of Glee

Greetings! Look, there's no denying it, I hate Glee (not as much as Big Bang Theory), as you can guess. Kind of understandable as I'm not the biggest fan of musicals in general, it just bugs me when people act normal and next thing burst into song and well rehearsed dance numbers. I just don't get it honestly, I really don't. Often cartoon ideas come to me from something I just blurt out as it just pops into my head, like this one. I was at work a while ago and we were playing the soundtrack for that damn Rock of Ages movie, which was really annoying as it was all cool songs ripped to shithouse by someone else and I happen to say to my fellow colleague Scotty the first thing that popped into my head, which was: "Man not since Glee have I ever heard so many good songs so viciously bent over and anal raped". 

Can you guess what the original version of this cartoon looked like? Yep, one guy with a Glee t-shirt viciously anal raping another guy with "Your Favourite Song on his shirt. Now, I'm not one to usually shy away from inappropriate material and honestly, I haven't here...I don't think so anyway. But I was kind of worried about offending people, you know people who like anal sex....and rape victims. Did I pussy out on this one? I kind of prefer this version as it's a tad more subtler.....just a tad. Anyway, I wanted to refine it and work on it somewhat. Over the last couple of days I've been thinking about it, and up until yesterday I was planning on having a guy in a Glee shirt getting out of a really trashed rental car with "You Favourite Song" written on the bonnet with the guy tossing the keys to an upset car rental guy. So at some point today I realised that was maybe a bit vague so I thought about the fact that Glee 'kills' good songs, which led to me this final idea. In another effort to make the joke a tad easier to get, I used the stupidly long titled I went with, which is funny considering how I was only talking the other day in my Special Features post about how much I tend to avoid long titles. I think it helps, just in case people do look at the joke as a literal interpretation and think I'm having a dig at Glee fans. Which I'm not, if you like that bullshit than good for you, you weirdo.

Until next time!

Mike

Domination Catalyst (Special Features)

Hello again and welcome to another Special Features, first off here's the entire page of the initial sketches I did for this week's cartoon "Domination Catalyst":

I did have some initial problems naming this cartoon as you can see, the first title was "Not So Cute Now Are They?". I did like that title, but I always try and avoid long names where possible, it just complicates things. You can see down the bottom where I've done a few quick cat sketches and decided to keep them simple and basic, which honestly helped a lot as I had to draw so many damn cats in the end. I also had the main villain cat in the background more animated with his arm up and doing a big laugh, but in the end I liked the more creepier, calmer type villain. So once I got the basic layout sorted I moved onto the pencil drawing:

I've been really disappointed with my lettering of late as I've been going for a more casual, cartoony style. But it's been all over the place so this week I went back to using my old tried and true method of ruling lines, but still handwriting the text to help with consistency. Still tossing up whether to just go back to doing it in Illustrator like I used to. Then we move on to the final inked version:

I go through phases with how I do my shading on cartoons, at the moment I'm purely doing it all in Photoshop, by using darker colours as shadows. Other times I use hatching and linework during the inking phase. For some reason I always jump back and forth for periods, so expect the linework to come back again at some point. Over the years I've experimented with lots and lots of different paper to use when inking my cartoons. I know a lot of pros use drawing board, but it tends to be expensive so I've always searched for more cost effective paper. The main issue I always have is bleed, I hate it when my lines bleed and cheap paper bleeds like a bitch. I've tried Bleedproof paper, tracing paper, you name it. The best paper I found for me? Glossy Laser Jet printer paper is awesome, not too expensive and doesn't bleed at all. For years I used to use Matte Printer paper, but it had a kind of coating on it that used to mess up all my felt-tip pens. Plus matte paper isn't very popular anymore and it's hard to find, but it made me find something better anyway. The only real issue I have with it is, that, especially with felt-tip pens, the back isn't very dark or 'black'. But once I scan it into Photoshop I just crank the contrast and fiddle with the brightness and it's all good. Try it, I'm a big fan of the paper and it's probably something most wouldn't think to use honestly.

Hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look and found it interesting and informative, see you all again on Monday!

Mike

Domination Catalyst

Greetings again my friends, how are we all? I usually like to have a bit of a story behind how I get the idea for each week's cartoon, but not so much this week. Honestly the idea for this one just popped into my head during the week when I was quite sick (yes, I've been sick yet again, the wondrous joys of having young children) and lying on the couch in the morning watching TV. Yep, that was it, I think there was something on TV about cat memes on the internet....I don't even remember honestly. All I remember is that I really liked the idea of a James Bond like cat villain trying to take over the world and that's why there's so damn many cat memes, pictures and videos on the internet. I also liked the idea of a room full of overworked cats tapping away on laptops. So I wasn't too confident that the idea would be that funny to everyone, but I didn't care, I thought it was and I really liked it so there.

If you were wondering why the cat has a baby on his lap, it was because I was thinking of that Bond villian you used to stroke a white cat on his lap and I thought of the opposite, a human. It needed to be small, I was going to do a midgit, but still too big so I just went with a baby...as weird as it may be, I like it damn it!

As you may remember I was uber excited last week about finally getting a whole day to myself as both my boys were going into daycare together for the first time. Well that didn't happen, well my youngest, Kylar, got to have his first day at daycare anyway. But typical, my eldest son Dash was sick and highly contagious and couldn't go. So, hopefully if all goes well this Friday will be my big day, but I'm trying not to get too excited this time in case something else goes wrong.... pessimist that I am.

I've got some sketches to put up again this wednesday for a bonus special feature for this cartoon and I'll talk so more about how I created it as well.

So, until then, later!

Mike

Blown (Special Features)

Welcome! I had an idea a while ago to do some behind the scene's 'special features' posts to show in more detail just how I create my cartoons. Mainly from an art point of view as I tend to talk a lot about the idea process in the original post with the cartoon.

So after the idea is finalized I do a super rough sketch, just to get the layout all sorted. In this case it was a quick sketch just to see if I could pull off a drawing of Bumblebee:

Then I move onto the pencil drawing:

You probably can't see all that clearly, but I'm pretty messy when it comes to drawing. And you can tell where I've had the most difficulty as it's very smudged from rubbing it out and doing it over, which in this case is Bumblebee's hand and arm. Also at this stage I started toying around with the idea of a background which I later abandoned. Notice the date and name at the top? I pretty much date and name everything now, mainly for prosperity reasons and of course and copyright issues, if that every happened. I never used to do this and I wish I had, just so I could have everything catalogued in chronological order just to see how far I've come and all. One of my many talents is research, and I always like to my visual research as much as possible, but sometimes time is a factor and I can't. This one was easy though, I just used my old friend Google Image search! To find the Bumblebee image I needed:

Of course I wasn't going to do an exact copy, would have taken way too long and it doesn't really fit in with my 'style' and all.

So, the next step is I take the pencil sketch and trace it onto some glossy laser jet paper (more on that other week) using my lightbox (a big box with 2 fluoro lights in it, with a piece of glass on the top) using a special 'non-photo blue' pencil (basically it doesn't show up on photocopies and barely at all when you scan it the right way). I then trace the over the blue lines with various ink pens and viola! Notice the Autobot logo missing? I really struggled to draw it freehand, so I printed off the above picture of Bumblebee and traced it, inked it and scanned it in separately to combine when I coloured it. 

Next, I scan that into my PC and use good old Photoshop and my awesome Wacom Tablet to fix up any mistakes and clean up lines, then I colour it in. Finally I export it to Illustrator to add my border and text and it's all good to go! Here's the final product: http://brinkscartoons.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/blown.html

So what do you think? In the next Special Features I'll go into more detail about each stage per week or so, hope you enjoyed it!

Until next time!

Mike

Blown

Greetings again my dear friends! This week's cartoon didn't almost happen for a couple of reasons, I am feeling a little under the weather and I'm tired so a couple of times earlier I contemplated bailing and posting an old cartoon. The other major reason was I've been putting off doing this one as it's harder to draw than most, and honestly I was planning on leaving it until I had some more time to do it, but I didn't have any other final ideas ready so I just went 'screw it'! Yes, I wasn't keen on the idea of drawing a Transformer and I probably would have kept putting it off anyway, so I'm glad I did it now. And you know what? I'm quite proud of this one actually, it came out better than I anticipated I must say, time to give myself a pat on the back....pat, pat

Were you all worried that I was going all clean with the last 2 weeks' cartoons being so wholesome and all? As if! You know me, I'm sure it was just a fluke. 

I've had this idea for ages now, at one point I had Bumblebee and the Michelin Man both walking out of the bathroom and them getting cranky at the guy for assuming Bumblebee just blew Michelin Man. In the end I thought I'd simplify it more (also why I went with no background as when I tried it, it looked too busy and I don't think it needs it...oh that and I ran out of time as well!), plus I really liked the idea that Bumblebee is in fact getting it on with the Michelin Man. I loved Bumblebee when I was a kid, I even had a metal toy of him (back in the day when Transformers toys were made of metal and not cheap plastic, ahhhh the good old days......god I'm old) which I wish I still had all my old toys to give to my boys now, that and I could have used it as a model for this drawing! Who would have thought all those years later I'd be drawing a cartoon about him having oral sex with a tire company mascot.

Anyway, hope you all like it, see you next time!

Mike

iLost in Transit

Greetings again my friends! This week's cartoon was a request/challenge by my good mate Don, who asked my the other day "when are we getting an Apple maps joke?". Funny story though, the idea I was always planning to do this week was pretty much a large group of people standing in a park playing with their phones and in the background you can see a big sign saying "The first annual Twitter fan club social BBQ". I really like the idea of Twitter fans trying to be social and they all just end up standing around tweeting on their smartphones. You know what? I still do like this idea, I may just change it now, but can you see where this is going? So I literally only came up with this final idea a couple of hours ago, as I thought I'd give this Apple Maps thing a go (I do love a challenge) and I just happen to be thinking about both things and then about combining the two ideas and boom! I ended up really liking the idea of a large group of iPhone fans all getting lost trying to get to their fan club BBQ because the Apple Maps sucks as you may all know by now, I'm not a massive Apple fan at all. So any chance to poke fun at them and I'm all over it (hence why the guy's iPhone is freakin' huge and long like a TV remote), so cheers Don!

The thing that I did take some time to sort out was just how subtle to make the joke, in fact just before I finished it, it was not as subtle and spelled out a bit more. In the end, I went 'screw it' and did it how I wanted to as I'm a big fan of subtle humour that you have to think a bit about before you get it. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but when I first stared cartooning I used to get some work for Australian "men's" magazines and a motorbike mag and they always requested that the jokes be painfully obvious and not subtle at all. So for years and years I just got into the habit of always doing cartoons that way and it wasn't until I started this blog that I now deliberately try to go the opposite direction and make the joke more subtle. As I said before, those are the jokes I always like myself, so it makes sense really. In the end I did conceded a tad though as if you look at the final inked artwork the thought bubble is "Where is everybody?". The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to give a bit more of a hint as to what the joke was, so I changed it to "How did they all get lost?" hence why the text is done via computer as it was getting late when I changed my mind and I was in a hurry. 

The countdown has begun! Yep, Friday the 12/10/12 is my first whole day to myself when both my boys will be in daycare so I can cartoon! Very excited. As it's the first one though I might have an actual day off and have some quality "me time" (ie, on the couch playing games all day).....ahhh, it's been so long.

Until next time!

Mike