Here’s my weekly batch of new cartoons.  The first one is my “Stand Your Ground” cartoon.  Any cartoon about guns gets a lot of crazy response – as this one did.  People are such nuts.  Here is the rough pencil sketch.

 

Next I did the finished line art. I dragged three different speech balloons into position in a layer in Photoshop, rather than actually drawing all the speech balloons.

I had mixed feelings about whether to leave it as line art for the black and white version. There is something elegant about line art with no tone – but I couldn’t make up my mind, so I did a gray version, and I made both versions available to the syndication customers. Interestingly, half of the editors downloaded the line version, and half went for the gray version. Go figure.

Here it is in color.  I added some subtle texture to the ground.

Here is how it looked the next day in my local newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Lots of cartoonists were drawing cartoons that were critical of the media attention paid to the new baby future king of England. I thought I would go with cute rather than critical. I don’t have any angry feelings about this subject. Cute is fine with me. Here is the line art that most people will see in the newspaper.

And here’s the color.  I’m trying to do more color that looks like I’m using a sponge, as I used to do back in the days when i painted with gouache.

We almost saw the “Nuclear Option” happen in the Senate, when Senator Harry Reid threatened to get rid of the filibuster rules that Republicans were using to block Obama nominees.  There was a compromise, but I suspect we’ll see this Nuclear Option thing happen again soon.  Here’s the gray version, with sponge texture (the line art was too spare on this one, it needed gray tone).

Yes, that’s a very Herblockian “Mr. A-Bomb.”  Gotta love Herblock.  Here’s the color version, with spongy texture.

 

Most of the country had a crazy heat wave last week, which is always a good excuse for a trite, Global Warming cartoon.  This one was fun to draw, and I went with the line art – no gray tone for the black and white version of this one.

And here’s the color version …

That’s it!  I think I’ll draw Detroit tomorrow.