Cartoons for your Business Special offer!

Hi, my name is Leonard, and I'm a very enthusiastic cartoonist and designer. I have experience of applying *very* special effects to my cartoons, which will give your business cartoons REAL impact that many other cartoonists won't offer. This month I have a special offer for window cleaners who are called Dave. Have this wonderful logo for your business (perhaps on your van, or if you don't have a van, you could have it made into a sticker for your bucket). As a special offer for this month only, I have added a special effect to this cartoon logo (normal price for such effects is £3.29).


You may have noticed that there's room for your phone number, which new customers who've seen your van/bucket will be able to phone to book you to clean their windows. Remember to ask about access to the back garden, and the situation with dogs etc.


** If you are called dave, and you do clean windows, but the hair is wrong then please get in touch. I could change the hair colour very easily, for a limited price of only £4.83.


Next week: I'm doing a business card for a plumber called Hank.

New Year. New Cartoons.

Well I do hope you all had a very nice Christmas (Xmas). I know that I did. Lovely time with the family, but sadly for the world of cartoons not much time to draw in-between peeling sprouts and being a busy mother of two. This led me to think about the meaning of Christmas more and more this year. What's it all for? Well apart from the wonderful gifts I received, including a lovely bumper pack of Gel pens from WHSMITHS from my partner. They are still in the wrapper with the giant Toblarone (Chocolate) bar, but I intend to put them to good use very soon.


Unsurprisingly the commissions for cartoons dried up somewhat over the Christmas season of Wintevil. At first I feared this might have something to do with the recession we keep reading so much about in the Daily Mail and other such places suchlike. But it seems those in the market for a cartoon, were also enjoying the Christmas (Xmas) holiday season too as well.


Here's a cartoon of my eldest opening his favourite Christmas (Xmas) present, which is what Christmas (Xmas) is all about really: 

Hilarious Computer Joke.

This is a recent joke cartoon that I did for a client to see that I could provide some jokey type cartoons for his Ye Olde Computer Shoppe business in the local high street. He wanted something that he could send out to all his customers via email or facebook (he's yet to decide). After he had given me his briefs, I set to work thinking of all the amusing things about computers that I could put into a jokey type cartoon for his computer business as previously discussed.


I did this on my computer with my Wancom Bamboo tablet. IT's a very expensive piece of professional equipment that only professional cartoonists are allowed to buy, but if you can afford one then I think you should. I have drawn this cartoon in just 7 hours, from the client brief to the finished article (no, not this article, I did it last week). I did this cartoon in the style of Bill Tidy or Larry. Check out the filing cabinet!


Next time: How to drawer cartoon filing cabinets.

Making smooth images for the internet age.

I have been struggling for some time with getting the images I create to look just right on my website, or blog. No matter how low I make the resolution, or how many filters I apply, the images often look very poor quality.

I have decided that this must be because everyone else makes their jpeg images with Vector Graphics or something very technicological like that. Not knowing anything about vector graphics, I have decided to produce all my work in vector images from now on. Fortunately I don't have any commissions at the moment (that was lucky!) so I'll have time to play around with the various settings and get this right, and then advise others on how to be an expert with vector graphics.

Keep watching this space. I'm downloading http://inkscape.org/ now and hope to learn how to use this very soon. Smooth graphics are on the way soon!

Doing business on the internet.

If only I'd discovered the wonders of gel pens when I was younger. Perhaps I'd have chosen to be a cartoonist much earlier in life when I was younger? As it was I didn't decide to be a cartoonist until February this year. At first I thought it might be difficult, but then I joined a cartoonist forum and after giving some advice to the other cartoonists on there, I decided to give up my job at the drop in centre and devote my life to making wonderful cartoons and making people smile, with my dynamic and unique cartoons, always remembering that those that criticise are just jealous of my natural abilities to make people laugh. Everyone who has seen one of my cartoons has laughed at me - and there's no better endorsement of brilliant talent then that!  


Here's a quick look back at some of those cartoons.

Handy finger insertion (3)

In the final tutorial of this short tutorials on how to draw hands for your cartoon charactures, we are going to explore with the pointed finger or 'the wiggle' as some cartoonist call it. This can be a very important techique to give your characture a realistic and believable relationship with other charactures in your drawings. It can also help if a characture is able to point at something that isn't as obvious as it should be, or just needs to press a button (such as in Robot cartoons and the thus suchlike).

Rip off car insurance. Grrrrrrrr.....

I was charged with seeking a good deal for my wife/girlfriends car insurance, so I visited the local insurance broker (broker is an appropriate name for them, as they seem to specialise in breaking people!). I gave them all the information required for them to do a search on the details required. I get a quote for £345 for 1 years insurance including a no claims discount of 3 years. Everything seemed fine, when I get a phone call from the broker the next day to say that the insurance has been refused because I'd forgotten to tell them about a little accident my girlfriend had over 4 years ago when driving her Fiat Tipo.

Now when I tried to seek another insurance policy I was told that the price would now be over £1,000 as a result of this minor shunt she had in her Fiat Tipo. WHAT??? This is a complete rip off. I was furious, and if the police hadn't already been called I would have probably given them a reason to claim on their insurance. Don't insurance companies realise that once someone has had such a minor shunt, they are MORE CAREFUL IN THE FUTURE! Therefore, thus making them safer drivers in the future. I'm sick and tired of this rip -of -Britain that I've been told about in the quality press such as thus Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. This is just another example of it. Well now we are making a stand against R.O.B. and needless to say my Wife/Girlfriend is now driving without any insurance at all. I understand there's a fund available for un-insured drivers to make claims on anyway, so it seems pointless to just let them financially rape her like this.

Off my shopping trolley.

I'm often asked what I know about layers and backgrounds. To be honest, very little, but I'm not going to let something like that stop me from explaining to you what they are.

Here's a picture I recently did for a childrens book illustration (due to be published within the next 2 years).

As you can see I have created a rather wonderful background for this picture with very professional looking gradients (more about them later).
Now the trick is to use layers for each element of the picture, so I can get rid of the bits of the picture which I don't want to be there with just a simple click of my moose. Thus, therefore this:

And thus there we have it. Off with the shopping trolley. I didn't have to draw the picture twice. I used the layers function of the menu to 'hide' the shopping trolley from view before saving it twice. That bit was the hardest work.

Here's the background on it's own, which you can download to place your own creations withon it. What funny ideas can you think of for such a background image? Perhaps you'd like to draw a dog, or maybe some kind of man with a large gardening implement? I'm looking forward to seeing them all. Please email them to me at the usual address (please, no more Korean spam). The one which wins the first prize will win an all expenses trip to having a link on this very website to their own website.

The best fonts for your cartoons.

Searching on my copy of photoshop today I realised that there's a font called Comic Sans. Clearly this has been designed with cartoonists in mind. Brilliant. We now have our own font for use in our cartoons. It's a great shame that there's not more comic fonts available to us, but until there is, we should all be using COMIC SANS as much as possible to promote the cartoon industry.

Help! My computer hates me!

I am often asked to help people with computer problems, as I am known as a bit of an expert in matters around computers and other things that use electricity.

Usually most problems can be solved by re-installing the operating system, but what most people don't realise is how much an operating system can cost. Especially if they require a new one to install every few months! An elderly neighbour came over to my house the other week to ask some advise on his laptop, which he was having trouble with. The problem he was having was that he was having a problem opening some attachments in Hotmail. I told him that he probably had some sort of virus, but I could help him by defragging his hard disk drive and then re-installing the operating system. He was very happy with this and left his computer with me for a few days.

Once I'd opened up his laptop (not easy on this particular model, and one of the screws had a mashed head) I set to work to repair his machine and reinstall the operating system.

After a few hours of fiddling about, his computer was now working like new. I was going to test it to see if he could now open these HOTMAIL attachements, but he'd forgotten to give me his password. Burt came round later that day to collect his machine, and seemed happy when I told him that it was all working again. He was looking forward to getting his machine back, as he had many digital photos on there of his deceased wife.

Being a pensioner, I agreed to let Burt pay me the £300 he owed me in installments. Many of you reading this might be thinking that all this sounds scary, but there's no need to worry about unforseen expenses like this. If Burt had come to me sooner with his problems, then I would probably been able to sort out his machine for around £20 (hourly rate).

So it's always important to use the expertise of a local computer expert to keep your machine running smoothly at all times. Computers are so complex these days, that many tasks are beyond most normal people.