Ben Caldwell dazzles us this week with his eye-popping cover art for Catwoman’s Teen Titans GO! variant. In addition to comics, Caldwell has worked as a toy designer, on various animation/video-game projects, and childrens book illustration. He also writes and draws a popular series of “how to” books called Action! Cartooning. It’s nice to see more and more artists like Caldwell bringing their “animation-style” to comics. It makes perfect sense since there’s so much crossover nowadays between comics & the TV/movie industry.

Ben Caldwell is also known for The Dare Detectives! series of graphic novels, The Wizard of Oz All-Action Classics adaptation, and Star Wars Clone War Adventures comics.

Caldwell graduated from the Parsons School of Design for Illustration and currently lives in New York with his family.

You can see the latest sketches and project updates by following Mr. Caldwell on his twitter page here.

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

Summer Vacation!

Hope everyone is having a great summer! Last week I headed down to the beach here in North Carolina for a short little summer vacation. Unfortunately it rained harder than I’ve ever seen it rain. It was one of those rains where you think it can’t possibly rain any harder but then it does….all day. Just as we checked into the hotel it started let up. The sun popped out for about an hour and half so the kids and I grabbed our boogie boards and headed down to the ocean. Right about the time we decided to to get out of the water the rain came back. And so it went the following day. Two hours of sun at the beach in the morning (with the darkest storm cloud I’ve ever seen on the horizon) followed by a torrential down pour. Since we don’t live too far we decided enough was enough, jumped in the car and headed back home. All in all everyone had a pretty great time. I think maybe we’ll head down another time before the summer is done and see if we can’t get a little better weather.

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From the Blue Sky Folder – Wonder Woman in Adobe Illustrator CC 2014 by Bob Ostrom Studio

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The Blue Sky Folder

Deep in the archives of my computer there is a small beacon of light that shines brightly through the darkness. It’s called the Blue Sky Folder. Inside is a collection of sketches, experiments, new styles, new techniques, story concepts and a bunch of projects in various stages of completion. This folder is basically a resting place for all the ideas that rattle around inside my head long enough for me to get them down on paper or into various stages of digital completion. Like many other artists I’m always restless to try new things and this is my outlet. 

This is a Blue Sky piece I began almost 3 years ago. I wasn’t quite sure where I was headed with it at the time so I put it in hold to work on other things. I had totally forgotten about it until I was leafing through the the folder recently and it caught my eye. One of the main reasons I had put this one on hold was that the techniques I’d used to create it were very time consuming and a bit unrefined. Looking at the piece again I realized that the solution was sitting right in front of me. I didn’t have my Cintiq tablet when I started so any digital freehand drawing was pretty much out of the question? As I popped the file up on my screen I realized that was no longer an obstacle. It only took me a few hours to finish the piece and I’m psyched because now I finally have a great way to save time and paint right on the computer.

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Johnny Appleseed Childrens Book Illustration.

This one was from a recent series of books I worked on last year. I’ve tried this look before once or twice using traditional art and a scanner but it was always a tedious process to get the lines bold enough. The Cintiq has helped make creating bold pencil lines very easy. My next goal is to start working on a more natural watercolor look.

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In the early 2000s, upon learning that I was a cartoonist as well as writer, my Scholastic editor Virginia Dooley proposed an update to a 1960s book that used cartoons to teach vocabulary. She (postal) mailed me samples from the book. The cartoons used pistols, cigarettes, and other elements you would not see in a typical children’s book today.

The book may not have been aimed at young people.

In any case, the idea was to create 180 cartoons, one for every day of the school year—new words, new gags. It seemed like a fun challenge.

Vocabulary Cartoon of the Day (grades 4-6) came out in 2005.

Doctor Cartoon  – By Bob Ostrom Studio

I was just thinking… What the fill in the blank questions on the SATs looked like this?
(Feel free to answer in the comments section. You will receive your test scores in the mail in about 3 weeks)

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Illustration Work in Progress

Every once and a while it’s fun to post a little illustration work in progress. Here’s quick sneak peak at my latest:

The post Cartoon Illustration – Bob Ostrom Studio appeared first on Illustration.

You’ve researched your character extensively, tailored her to your audience, sketched hundreds of versions, and now you lean back content as you gaze at your final character model sheet. But now what? Whether you want to use her in an animated film, television show, video game, web comic, or children’s book, you’re going to have to make her perform. How a character looks and is costumed starts to tell her story, but her body language reveals even more. Character Mentor shows you how to pose your character, create emotion through facial expressions, and stage your character to create drama. Author Tom Bancroft addresses each topic with clear, concise prose, and then shows you what he really means through commenting on and redrawing artwork from a variety of student “apprentices.” His assignments allow you to join in and bring your drawing to the next level with concrete techniques, as well as more theoretical analysis. Character Mentor is an apprenticeship in a book.

Professional artists from a variety of media offer their experience through additional commentary. These include Marcus Hamilton (Dennis the Menace), Terry Dodson (X-Men), Bobby Rubio (Pixar), Sean “Cheeks” Galloway (Spiderman animated), and more. With a foreword by comicbook artist Adam Hughes, who has produced work for DC, Marvel Comics, Lucasfilm, Warner Bros. Pictures, and other companies.

Grab this book Character Mentor: Learn by Example to Use Expressions, Poses, and Staging to Bring Your Characters to Life on Amazon.

• Paperback: 180 pages
• Publisher: Focal Press; 1 edition (April 24, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0240820711

BookExpo America opens today. 

At BEA eleven years ago, my cartoons appeared in the Publishers Weekly Show Daily.

On 3/8/11, I spoke at Pleasant Ridge Elementary in Overland Park, KS, notable for being the first school in which I sat in a bathtub in the library. (Also notable for being a great school.)

More than a year later, the school shared some flattering news about its Battle of the Books competition. A group of 4th graders who had lost the previous year changed their team name and tried again as 5th graders. In 5/11, they won. The team name?

The Dinobunnies.

In 1999, the way I partied like it was, well, that year was by joining the National Cartoonists Society.

This entitled me to a copy of the NCS membership album from 1996—the 50th anniversary edition. 

Jerry Robinson, one of the first (and best) ghost artists on Batman, who passed away in 2011, was a member of the National Cartoonists Society.

For a time, so was I.

And so I was given a copy of the NCS membership album (50th anniversary edition, no less). 

On 11/3/99, I launched my first website.

 

Tweet Before “meta” was physical, before Modernism became Posted, before Art Popped, cartoonists drew stories about cartoonists and cartooning! Some of it was autobiographical (or possibly semi-auto… I doubt Milt Gross almost became Batman!), some of it was pure fantasy.  (The pygmalian dream of a drawing come to life is represented twice in this volume, [...]

johnmartz:

For the third consecutive year I designed the poster for the National Cartoonist Society Foundation’s Jay Kennedy Scholarship for Cartooning.

The deadline is fast approaching — applications must be postmarked by December 15th, 2012. Any North American student who will be in their junior or senior year of college or university during the 2013-2014 academic year is eligible. You do not have to be an art major. More information at www.cartoonistfoundation.org

This is a great opportunity for any student who draws comics, does animation, or dabbles in any sort of cartooning. Only a few days left to get your application in the mail!

radiomaru:

A nice person teaching at CalArts did an anatomy lesson and included examples from me and Meredith Gran and others.

See, I … I know what i’m… i’m … doing….

http://stulivingston.blogspot.com/2012/10/life-drawing-for-animation-demoz.html

We are in a golden age of comics and cartoonists being embraced by smart people in academia. To those learning comics now as young people, enjoy this privilege that no other generation before yours has enjoyed! 

Oh jeez, just look at this poster by Joe Lambert for Cartoon College, the documentary about the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.

Can you spot the two dots in this Mick Stevens cartoon that threaten the New Yorker from being banned from Facebook?

(via Nipplegate: Why the New Yorker Cartoon Department Is About to Be Banned from Facebook : The New Yorker)