On the Drawing Board

Deadlines conquered.

Here are some images of the jobs I just finished and am working on now. The first two are from my latest MAD job entitled “When Video Games Become Religious”. Like the “Rejected Cars Characters” of a few issues ago, this was a little different than my usual work for MAD.

“Damn, it’s that same stupid shape again!”

“What would Jesus do?”

The challenge here was that I needed to draw images both from the “video game” world and the “real” world, and make it obvious there is a difference between the two. In order to accomplish this, I needed to make the art from each world very different. It was important to try and get the same kind of feel to the video game artwork that is seen in the actual graphics of the games, so the look of that “world” was going to be dictated to me somewhat by the look of the actual games. The real world I drew in the same manner I do most of my parody work (meaning not “real” at all, but my cartoon version of the world), but I also used the bluish cast of TV lighting in a dim room to create a muted and monochrome-like color palette for the real world, leaving the vibrant colors to the screens and game panels. That and the line work in the real world scenes set them apart nicely, I think. Of course my graphics for the video games are a far cry from the true look, but the feel of them is there. You can see the rest and enjoy the written gags in MAD #471.

It’s always fun and challenging to get different jobs like this from MAD. It’s a little frustrating as well, since I am forced out of my comfort zone with them, but that is always a good thing.

The other job, which dropped into my lap suddenly and with a lot of urgency is for the Minnesota Twins, our local pro baseball team. I’ve done a lot of work for the Twins over the years, both for their magazine and for stadium giveaway posters of the team the last four seasons. These posters were caricatures of the entire team, which they insisted I do as a real painting so they could have the original. The paintings were in watercolor with a little airbrush, and are huge (24 x 40 inches). The printed posters were given away to the first 10,000 kids on Kids appreciation day, the last game of the season each year. Unfortunately the Twins have a new sponsor for that promo this year and they want to do a different give-away, so no poster in 2006.

The new job is a T-shirt design. A few weeks ago the manager for the Chicago White Sox, a nut-case named Ozzie Guillen, called the Twins a bunch of “little piranhas” because they have workmanlike, un-glamorous players up and down the line-up who take little bites out of the other team here and there until the other team is dead. The local and national media loved this, and so did the fans. Anyway they want a “piranhas” shirt done ASAP, so I got a call and had to bang out a bunch of roughs the last few days. I think we are getting close now, but likely more tweaks are on the way. Here are the current pencils designs of the back and front of the shirts, respectively:

??ᬨ‚Ć

A fun job, but it might never see print. You never know with these things. We’ll see.