Bloghorn asked PCO Artist of the Month, Steve Bright, how he makes his cartoons.
I have only just become fully digital, and now require an alternative power source to coffee and Chocolate Hobnobs to produce cartoons. It’s been a gradual process however.
The majority of my career has been carved out using automatic pencils, no-buff erasers, Gillott’s 303 nibs dipped in Rotring black drawing ink, sable brushes dipped in Winsor & Newton coloured inks, all employed upon A2 sheets of bleed proof marker pad paper or Bristol Board.
In the past ten years or so, computer technology has replaced or diminished the role of all of those elements. The recent arrival of my Wacom Cintiq has banished them from my drawing board completely. I now do everything using the Cintiq linked to my laptop, and my biggest fear is no longer a missed deadline, but a prolonged power cut.
Oddly, most of the tools I’d used in the early years was pretty much the same as that used by cartoonists for the previous hundred years. But such is the pace of the technology now, I’ve outgrown a scanner and several drawing tablets in a just few years. It’s a little bit scary for someone who swore he’d never change his drawing ways when others were dipping their toes in the cyber waters.
I’ve taken much longer than some to become a convert. But I have no regrets, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend others to do it when the time is right for them. I know I shall revisit the old methods again eventually, but for fun rather than commerce. There is no turning back now.