Democracy can be annoying when the guy who gets the most votes is the guy you really, really don’t want to win.
In the real-time video below you can see me drawing the cartoon, from rough sketch to finished color, ready for print. People like to ask me how long it takes to draw a cartoon – here is the answer! Keep an eye on Cagle.com where you can see me draw live in a popup window when I do a new cartoon, or follow me on Twitch.tv/darylcagle to get an alert when I draw live, and join the live chat while I draw!
As the economic problems facing newspapers continue, it is easy to presume that cartoonists are sacked because of tight budgets. Money troubles shouldn’t give cover to publications that dump cartoonists because of politics, particularly when the politics involve corrupt governments strong-arming the press.
My cartoonist buddy, Gado, is probably the best known African cartoonist. He recently lost his job, according to a report in the Times of Africa. Here is a notable quotes from the article:
Here’s a sample of Gado’s work from when he was a regular on Cagle.com.
In 2009 President Kenyatta, then the finance minister, tried to sue Gado over a cartoon pillorying him for a $100 million accounting error. In 2005 Gado outraged Muslims with a drawing of a woman suicide bomber asking: “I’m also going to get the 72 virgins… right?!”.
Gado was persuaded by his bosses to take a sabbatical last year after the Nation’s sister paper, The EastAfrican, was banned in Tanzania over a cartoon mocking President Kikwete. When he tried to return to work, Tom Mshindi, the editor-in-chief, said his contract would not be renewed.
Mr Mshindi denied that the decision was a reflection on the freedom of the press, which he said was “no better or no worse” than under Kenya’s previous government.
Gado said Mr Kenyatta and his deputy, William Ruto, had often put pressure on the paper’s management. “Freedom of the press is being rolled back and it’s dangerous,” he said. The Nation’s managing editor, Denis Galava, was sacked in January for an editorial attacking the government’s “almost criminal negligence”.
I’m hearing a lot about Trump the “strongman” from the pundits, both for his muscling his way through the primaries and for his “authoritarian” persona. OK. I can draw that.
The hair looks right on a body builder. You can watch me draw the whole thing live, in the video below. We’re working on editing these long streams into a short podcast, since watching me draw for five hours seems a little daunting – that said, jump around the video and you can get a sense of it.
When I draw live, there is a pop-up window on Cagle.com where you can watch and join in the live chat. Please join me and follow on http://twitch.tv/darylcagle
Everyone asks me how long it take me to draw a cartoon, this is how long!
Establishment Republicans are freaking out over Donald Trump’s continuing success in the primaries. My Hara Kiri elephant cartoon is an expression of conservative angst.
Watch me draw and color this cartoon in real time as I have a nice chat with the fans who are watching along on Twitch.
On this video I also draw a cartoon, for my local National Cartoonists Society’s Los Angeles chapter, of their mascot, Cornelius the Bear, who is an angel-bear who wears an ugly, plaid sports coat. Learn more about our strange club lore in the video. And here’s my Cornelius on the California flag.
It looks like the extremists and moderates in the Republican party are breaking up.
You can see me draw this one in real time in the video below – it starts at 1:13:19 (the first part is coloring the last cartoon).
Sorry, it looks like a chink at the beginning was lost in the transition from Twitch to YouTube. Here’s part two, showing me color the cartoon in Photoshop.
This morning I saw the cartoon in my local newspaper, which is always fun. Notice how the suit and purple skin tone are much darker in print, and much more blue; I need to remember to allow for darkening and blue-ing in print.
Trump looks like he has climbed the GOP mountain! Of-course, he is planting the flag in the elephant’s butt, and I thought hard about whether to drop the elephant’s pants. I decided not to drop the pants because I thought that would be too raunchy for the mainstream papers – this one might be too raunchy for them even with the pants in place.
I drew this one live, but I haven’t posted the video here. This stream was something of an adventure, as I continue to learn how to live-stream. I was experimenting with hosting other artists streams at the end of my own stream; this is a Twitch custom, when a stream ends it is a nice gesture for an artist to “host” another artist’s stream, so his audience at the end just moves on to the other artist. OK. I did that, and went out to dinner and an evening of watching the entertaining Republican debate.
When I woke up the next morning, I noticed that the computer was still streaming, for 19 hours. I sleep in the bedroom close by my studio, and had sent out a live stream of my snoring all night. To my surprise, I had an audience of 20 people watching the broadcast of nothing, and I was picking up new followers through the night at about the same rate as when I’m actively streaming. My program (OBS) that does the streaming, had frozen, and turning it off or quitting didn’t work, I had to force-quit.
On top of that nonsense, when I sat down at my computer this morning I was wearing my underwear and the stream got a nice view of me in my chones. (It could have been worse; there’s a 40% chance that I might not have been wearing any underwear.) YouTube and Twitch selected a random image from the stream for the lead image of the video, and both selected the view of my underwear. Finally, I understand what happened to Anthony Wiener, poor guy.
This is the Zika mosquito hitch-hiking from place to place.
Here he is in black and white. I usually do a special version for grayscale, rather than just gray scaling the color art.
In the video below you can see me draw this bad boy. I thought long and hard about whether to put a “Zika” label on the mosquito, and I made the manly decision to forego the label.
In the video below you can see me coloring the mosquito in Photoshop. It should open 14:40 into the video, that’s no mistake, it just takes out the time. I didn’t edit this one!
3/21/16 update: Here’s my mosquito as it appeared today in the Ouest France Newspaper, France’s highest circulation newspaper. Thanks to my buddy Kianoush Ramezani and his united sketches.org foundation that organizes this stuff. I’m impressed that they put my photo and bio alongside the cartoon.
The legal battle between the FBI and Apple promises to be epic. I come down on Apple’s side; we’ve seen how important technology is in undermining evil despotic regimes around the world. If courts can force tech companies to become foot soldiers in regime efforts to spy on their populations that will be a loss for freedom around the world.
I drew this one as a live stream. Watch me color it in Photoshop in real time in the YouTube video below (scroll past the timer at the beginning).
Click on the YouTube video below and it should start at 2:48:40 where I start drawing the Apple vs Despots cartoon. This was a long afternoon of work, and I drew the previous cartoon before this one. Sorry for the lack of editing, but hey, you see everything. I have nothing to hide.
