Spear-Cartoon_3483

Spear-Cartoon_3483
Originally uploaded by speartoons

Cartoon of Dad to son, "Don’t think of them as chores, but as opportunities."

I thought of this ideal because my kids are on spring break this week. My wife asked one of our kids to do a chore the other night. You would have thought we just told him to hold his arm in a barrel of leaches for a "reasonable" amount of time.

Suddenly, I thought of an image of a motivational speaker trying to get his kid to do his chores. Perhaps this speaker can challenge a corporation to reach for excellence and a government bail out. But I'm guessing even this captain of blarney couldn't get his son to clean the commode.

I've been experimenting with how to create my cartoons in Adobe Illustrator. In this instance, I used the shape tools such as the ellipses and rounded boxes to get the basic shapes. Then I warped them and distorted them how I saw fit.

I used my raw drawing right out of my sketchbook as the template.

When I had all the shapes just so, I converted them to a live paint object. This is my new, favorite tool in Illustrator. Not only can I use the paint bucket to colorize the fills, but I can also use it to apply different line widths to the strokes. It's a major time saver.

I am also testing wether I can handle just a black and white drawing for the weekdays and if anybody notices. I'd rather get several black and white cartoons out in a week than just one color. Alas, time keeps flowing and I'm caught in the undertow.

I drew this in Adobe Illustrtor CS2