Category Archives: Cartooning

The Animated Doodles of Dan Berry

Here's a cute music video for Jim Guthrie's "The Rest is Yet to Come". Artist Dan Berry made a panoramic background with simple animations of watercolor drawings. The result is a slow pan across a landscape of musicians, leaves and fire. He provides a peek at his process by posting pictures of the video in various stages of production. His main software tools are Photoshop and After Effects, along with a good scanner and watercolor paper. Dan Berry hosts a podcast where he speaks with cartoonists and others about their creative process. It's called "Make It Then Tell Everybody" and is available on iTunes.

The Endlessly Contorting Escher Girls

It seems that when women are depicted in action comics their spines turn to rubber, their breasts inflate and their feet taper to sharp points. Such is the world depicted by Escher Girls, a Tumblr that surfaces the most ridiculous depictions of female anatomy found in the latest comic books. The signature move on the site is the "Boobs & Butt Pose". This awkward maneuver allows the comic artist to render both the spherical breasts and the firm buttocks of his fantasy babe into one dynamic, über-sexy mass of body parts. The end result can look ridiculous to anyone with any familiarity with human anatomy. While the images usually depict the character fighting, the stance is completely unstable and not conducive to good attack or defense.
Some of the funniest posts swap male characters into the female poses and costumes to show just how ridiculous they are. Women in comics are often rendered as submissive tarts, contorted to the demands of a man's eye, while male characters are depicted as throbbing, steroid-pumped hunks of tense muscle. When the roles are switched the results can be hilarious.

Drawing Tangents

Cartoonist Chris Schweizer has an informative overview of composition problems that can pop up when drawing. The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents defines tangents as
...when two or more lines interact in a way that insinuates a relationship between them that the artist did not intend.
Chris follows with a delightfully illustrated list of ambiguities that often appear when composing pictures. They apply as much to photography as they do to drawing and cartooning and can often be overlooked when making an image. LINK: The Schweizer Guide to Spotting Tangents