Chewing Pencils

Algerian cartoonist Ali Dilem has been imprisoned for, well, annoying his president.
A quote from the Middle East Media Research Institute:
On February 11, 2006, Dilem was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and fined 50,000 dinars (€550), for dozens of cartoons he had published in Liberté during 2003 depicting Algerian President Abdelaziz Boutlefika. Dilem was sentenced under […]

Tip 3:- Learn to develop character.
Most of the time we think of character development as something only comic book artists, cartoon strip artists and book illustrators need to worry about. While this is certainly true, developing characters is something that all cartoonists need to come to grips with.
The characters that populate our art are what grab […]

You might notice a few changes to the appearance of Chewing Pencils over the next little while. I’m just trying to optimise it for search engines and other such techy stuff that I really should leave to others.
Hopefully all will be back to normal in the next day or two…

This is great!
Chris Wahl has begun to record the steps he takes to produce his great work and has posted the time-lapse videos on his blog.
There are a number of videos available to watch, but the series where he produces the image of the girl (shown left) is sensational. The colour and shading video is […]

Steve Benson, of the Arizona Republic Newspaper, has caused the biggest wave in the cartoon world since the Danish cartoons of Muhammad earlier this year. Any political comment that casts the American involvement in Iraq in a bad light is going to get some criticism, but this one has pressed all the wrong buttons. 
And you […]

A client contacts you through your website and asks if you can do a cartoon for him.
You ask for more details. The client sends all the info through.
You think everything sounds legit, and quote what you think is a reasonable price for the job.
The client gets back to you and says, “How much is that […]

If you’re the type that likes to enter cartoon contests, Andrey Feldshteyn has posted a list of competitions from around the world on his site.
While it’s never a good idea to rely on competitions as a source of income, it is a good idea to have a crack at a couple each year and see what […]

Tip 2:- Develop your drawing style.
Yes, I know this seems to fly in the face of some of the things I said in tip 1 but at some point we must admit that a large chunk of being a cartoonist means knowing how to draw. But it is also important to remember that cartooning is an […]

You see them all the time, but have you ever wondered what those little letters and numbers stand for on the end of your pencil?
In a nutshell, the pencil grading system that the bulk of the world uses starts at 9B and goes through to 9H. The “B” stands for blackness and gives an indication […]

Tip 1:- Become a good storyteller.
It is a popular misconception that cartooning is all about drawing. But if you take a look at some of the comic strips and editorial cartoons that appear in the papers each day, you’ll quickly release the simple fact that some of these guys can’t draw for peanuts!
Yet, there is no […]