By MIKE BALDWIN
Cornered may be the first syndicated cartoon that was designed to be used
in color.
It's created in color daily, as opposed to being colored as an after thought.
The color cartoon is then converted to grey-scale and the tones are tweaked
for papers without a color position.
Color cartoons appear larger, it's one way to offset the shrinking of comics.
But color has to be used carefully to add to your work.
For example, I use a very pastel palette which I feel complements the dead
pan, dry humor I do.
If the cartoon subject is about relationships I may choose warmer shades, a
business cartoon, cooler colors. A medical cartoon may contain greens and
other colors that remind me of hospitals etc.
A more slapstick cartoon might use a bolder palette.
I keep the lines clean in Cornered and fill in the colors in solid blocks
(no gradual tone shading). Shading tends to get lost in newsprint at the
size they appear. The palette of colors, even grays, are created using
cyan, magenta and yellow, no black. Only the line work is black. That keep
the colors from looking muddy.
Careless use of color can take away from your work. A good test is to
convert your color work to grays on the screen. If the b/w looks better,
you need to rethink your color use.
Most cartoonist today do their b/w work using a lot of brushwork and cross
hatching.
It makes their b/w work sing, but when this work is colored-in by a third
party, on top of all the line work, it can be less than successful.
Specifically, I draw on paper, scan, clean it up in PhotoShop, trace in
Streamline, and color and caption in Freehand. Then export as .eps files
for newsprint, and .gifs for the Web.
