Pollyticks

This article first appeared on my original pollyticks.com blog back in March 2007. It’s a little dated now — some of the tools have changed — but the techniques may still prove useful.

Make a Political Statement

Don’t let that fancy computer go to waste! Use it to make your own political cartoons, even if you can’t draw a lick. In this article I describe the tools and process I use to make the political cartoons on this site, along with lots of tips from things I learned the hard way.

Send me your cartoons! Please email me your creations, and don’t worry if you think we have different political views. I like all kinds of cartoons, and I’m here to have fun. Left or right — doesn’t matter to me.

Get Started Making Political Cartoons

Even if you’re not a great artist, you can still make compelling political cartoons with the help of a computer. Take it from me; I’m not a great artist, not by any means, but I think I’ve still been able to entertain people (and amuse myself) with my Pollyticks political cartoons.

A great deal of credit goes to the developers of a few pieces of software that I use on a regular basis. The programs I’m referring to are Adobe’s Photoshop Elements, an image editing application; Macromedia (now also Adobe) Flash, which I use to create text effects and to enhance some of my hand drawn (albeit horrible) artwork; and Plasq’s ComicLife, a cartoon and comic layout program that simplifies the process of adding comic speech bubbles to your cartoons.

I prefer to use an Apple Macintosh (Mac) computer most of the time, but all of the programs I’ve mentioned, with the exception of Plasq’s ComicLife, are also available for PCs running versions of Microsoft’s Windows. In this article, I’ll describe how I use all three applications to produce illustrations, comics and political cartoons and show how everything I do can also be done on a Windows PC without the use of ComicLife at all.

Over many years working with computers I’ve used quite a few programs in the image and illustration editing arena and will point out how alternatives to my favorite applications can also be used to accomplish a lot of the same tasks.

For the record, I don’t claim to be an expert with any of these programs or techniques, nor do I claim that my way is necessarily the best way to accomplish the things I’ll cover. My goal is only to describe how I do what I do, so that you can do it as well as I do, if not better.

Know What You Want to Say

Alright, let’s get started. The first thing to figure out is what you want your political cartoon to say, in other words, what it will be about. Very often I’ll be at my day job when an idea comes to me, and I’ll reach for a piece of scratch paper to jot it down, but typically I make my political cartoons in the mornings before work. I’m a creature of habit, and what works for me most of the time is jumping into the day’s news first thing in the morning. I get most of my political news from the Internet now, so I crawl out of bed into the living room, wipe the sleep from my eyes and point my laptop’s web browser at CNN.com. I start with CNN because I like the layout and trust the source, but I suggest you start with whichever news site you like best.

Since it’s usually 5:30AM when I’m looking for daily cartoon ideas, I want sites with a simple layout and good headlines. At that hour I’m not ready for a 3,000-word treatise on Bush White House foreign policy. I’m looking for a quick rundown on the big news of the day.

Use Tabbed Browsing

I like web browsers that supports tabbed browsing, like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7.0, Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox (for both PC and Mac). Tabs let you open many different websites at the same time and quickly jump between all of them. If you’ve never used tabs for web browsing before, I highly recommend you give them a try. The feature is probably built right into your browser already. I find that of the hundreds of features available in most web browsers today, tabs are among the most useful, especially for research.

My favorite websites for political cartoon ideas are CNN.com, Yahoo.com (particularly their News section), Drudgereport.com (sometimes conservative, but often breaks big stories before the traditional media outlets do), Google News, YouTube (yes, YouTube), Fark.com (great for offbeat news), Digg.com (World News section), Daryl Cagle’s Professional Cartoonists Index, Washingtonpost.com and — brace yourself — FoxNews.com. FoxNews has a reputation for media bias (leaning to the right), but I don’t care. They write great headlines and employ some of the best photojournalists in the business.

In addition to the above websites I have a small library of Gary Larson’s Far Side books, which I lovingly refer to as my “secret weapons.”

Storyboard Your Ideas

Once I have an idea in mind for a political cartoon, I either scribble it down on scratch paper or fire up TextEdit (on the Mac; Notepad or Wordpad on the PC) and quickly type it out. If you haven’t noticed, a lot of my cartoons are photo-toons, so when I find an image I want to parody in a cartoon I’ll copy and paste it into an image editor like Photoshop or save a copy of it to my computer desktop for later use. I’ll describe that process soon. For now, the focus is on figuring out what you want your political cartoon to say.

Some of the best advice I’ve ever encountered on how to generate political cartoon ideas comes from famed political cartoonist Mark Fiore who said, “The most important factor in making an animated editorial cartoon effective is having something to say. Just like with a print political cartoon, it’s got to have an opinion and punch or it becomes something entirely different.”

With an idea for a political cartoon firmly in mind, the next thing to decide is if I’m going to draw it out, use photographs to tell the story, or try a combination of both drawn art and photos. Now is as good a time as any to address the question of copyright.

Pay Attention to Copyright

Unfortunately, I’m not an attorney. I’ve consulted attorneys on the subject of copyright law, but I can’t claim to be an expert. Hopefully, you’ll find the following information useful, but for a more detailed look at copyright and fair use, please check the U.S. Copyright Office, Publaw, Nolo, Wikipedia, or consult with an intellectual property (IP) attorney.

You may have heard the term “fair use” before. It refers to an exception in copyright law that allows for the use of copyrighted material (photographs snapped by someone else, for example). The purpose and character of your intended use of any copyrighted work is the single most important factor in determining whether your use of it is fair use. The question to ask here is whether you are merely copying someone else’s work verbatim or instead using it to help create something new, like a political cartoon made using photographs of political figures coupled with dialogue to tell a story unlike the one conveyed by the photographs initially. The Supreme Court calls such a new work “transformative.” The more transformative your work, the more likely your use is a fair use.

Your best bets are to dramatically change a copyrighted work from its original state, or to avoid using any copyrighted material at all if you can’t get permission from the copyright holder for your intended use. I find many of the images I use in my political cartoons on photo hosting sites like Flickr and Photobucket. Some, but not all, images on these sharing sites are public domain and free to use without permission. The Creative Commons is another great resource, with literally tens of thousands of royalty-free photographs available for download free of charge.

Government websites are another excellent source of photographs you can use or alter in your political cartoons. Keep in mind that public figures are generally fair game for commentary or parody, but take care if you combine images of, say, a clown’s hat with a picture of President George W. Bush. Your use of the hat might not be considered fair use if the photograph is copyrighted. I’ll address copyright and fair use in depth in a future article, but for now just know that the more you transform an original work, the better off you’ll be.

To Draw or Not to Draw

When deciding how I’m going to produce a political cartoon, I consider the complexity of the image I’ve imagined, the pictures I may have found online while searching for cartoon ideas, and the time I have available to spend on a cartoon that day. Creating a cartoon from scratch using hand drawn artwork can take me 4-5 hours. Photo ‘toons typically require less time to make, but that’s not always the case. Creating convincing image “masks,” where one photograph is seamlessly blended into another, can also take a while.

If I’m pressed for time before work, very often I’ll opt for a photo ‘toon, or, brace yourself, I’ll recycle artwork I may have used in a previous cartoon, perhaps making slight modifications to it. Many political cartoonists, like Mark Fiore, admit to recycling images in their political cartoons. The key is making each finished work appear fresh to the reader. If you can do that with recycled artwork or images, more power to you.

Get the Right Tools for the Job

I’m going to assume you already have access to a computer, odds are either a computer running Microsoft Windows or Mac OS 10. I do everything for Pollyticks — from writing articles to producing my political cartoons — on an Apple Mac, specifically a 12″ Apple Powerbook with a 1GHz G4 processor and 1.25GB of RAM running Mac OS 10.4 (since writing this article in March of 2007, I’ve since upgraded to a faster 13″ Apple MacBook). That’s a lot of techno-babble that translates loosely to “My slow 3-year-old laptop.”

To get hand-drawn artwork into my laptop for upload to Pollyticks.com I use an inexpensive $50 Canon flatbed scanner (Model: LIDE 80) or a $99 Wacom Graphire4 digital drawing tablet (the new Wacom Bamboo is even better), which allows me to draw and paint directly into programs like Photoshop or Flash. If you can draw at all, I highly recommend getting a drawing tablet because it not only saves time but also produces better looking results. When you use a scanner to import artwork into a computer, the scanner captures all the tiny imperfections on the sheet of paper, in addition to your artwork. By drawing directly into programs using a digital drawing tablet, you avoid that problem.

Everything I do on my Mac can also be done on a Windows PC with a few slight modifications to the process to account for the absence of ComicLife for Windows. Plasq, the program developer, says they’re working on a version of ComicLife for Windows users, so stay tuned for that by checking their website for updates at Plasq.com.

I prefer the look and feel of Apple computers and the software that runs them, but for something like designing political cartoons, the choice between Windows or Mac is a matter of personal preference more than anything else.

Earlier in this article, I mentioned the three programs I use to make Pollyticks cartoons: Adobe Photoshop Elements, Macromedia Flash, and ComicLife.

The one I couldn’t live without is Adobe Photoshop Elements. With Photoshop I can draw cartoon characters, edit a picture of the White House, or paste a picture of Vice President Cheney’s head onto a turtle’s body. It can also create comic panel borders, apply drop shadows (subtle shadows around comic panel windows that produce a cool 3D effect) and create speech bubbles with text for dialogue — pretty much everything it takes to be able to produce a Pollyticks-style political cartoon.

Macromedia Flash is first and foremost a program used to create 2D (two dimensional, ala Comedy Central’s South Park cartoon) computer animations, but it’s also a useful drawing tool. I use Flash when I draw characters for cartoons because it has a feature (Bitmap Tracing) that smoothes lines, giving them a professional look. And Flash produces what are called vector graphics, which can be easily enlarged or shrunk without losing detail. Normally, when a picture or drawing is enlarged, the tiny colored dots (pixels) that make up the image start to look blocky. Not the case with vector graphics, which retain their smooth lines regardless of size.

The final program I use to make political cartoons is Plasq’s ComicLife, a tool so far available only for Apple Macs (sorry Windows PC users). It simplifies the job of adding speech bubbles and dialogue to cartoons. Photoshop can do it too, but it’s a lot easier with ComicLife.

Photoshop Elements is the one tool I couldn’t live without, but if you’re just starting out and want to see what using a similar image editing program is like before plunking down $70 on Photoshop Elements, GIMP, an open source (free) image editor, can do everything Photoshop Elements can do and more. It’s not quite as user friendly, meaning it might take you a little longer to figure out, but it’s a powerhouse program available for both Windows PCs and Macs (make sure you download the right version). Many of the features I use to make political cartoons, like the lasso tool (which I’ll describe later) and layers, work much the same way in both Photoshop and GIMP.

Draw with Flash

Let’s work on an idea I have for a political cartoon starring me and President Bush. The image of me will be a hand-drawn caricature, but I’m going to use a photograph for the president. I’ll combine both images together, add speech bubbles and save the cartoon in a format ready to email or upload to a website or blog.

The first program I’m going to use is Flash, in which I’ll create a cartoon version of myself and export it to an image. Images you want to email or upload to a website should usually be saved in .jpg format. Your other options are .tif, .gif and .png (among others), but most of the time you’ll use .jpg files because they’re compressible, meaning able to be shrunk and downloaded quicker.

File size is a different measurement than the actual physical dimensions of an image. That’s a tough concept for beginners to understand. File size and image size are two different things. Be careful not to compress an image too much as the more heavily something is compressed, the lower the detail. The goal is to find a balance between file size and image detail. I usually compress my cartoons down to around 100KB each.

FLASH TIP: One of the best Flash tutorial websites around is Bradfitzpatrick.com. Brad has a number of video tutorials showing how he uses Flash’s drawing tools to draw. Brad is a great cartoonist. I use the same Flash technique he does, which involves using the “line” and “selection” tools instead of the more popular paint brush and pencil tools. I’ll explain how to draw with Flash further in a future article. For now, you can use a mouse and Flash’s “pencil” tool. They’ll work fine too.

Edit Cartoons with Photoshop

Now that I’ve got my caricature created in Flash, I’m going to open it in Photoshop Elements. From the File menu in Photoshop, I click ‘Open’ and select the file of my caricature, wherever I saved it on my computer. While I’m here, I’ll also open the picture of the president, so that both images are opened in Photoshop at the same time.

Using Photoshop’s Magic Wand or Magnetic Lasso tools I’ll select, or cut out, the caricature from its white background, because all I want to paste into the picture of the president is the caricature itself, not the white background that surrounds him.

In most programs, the concept of copy/cut & paste works similarly. First, you copy something — either a single word, pages of a document, a file, a piece of an image or an entire photo — which sticks it into the computer’s memory. Then, you can paste that thing someplace else. The catch is that generally only one thing can be copied or cut (like copy, except that it moves the original) at a time. Once you copy or cut something new by clicking the copy/cut button, the batch of text or picture you previously cut or copied gets replaced in memory.

Copy into ComicLife

With my caricature pasted into the photograph of our fearless leader, I want to get the combined image from Photoshop into ComicLife where I can easily add my speech bubbles. Once again, the copy/paste feature is perfect for the task. First, from within Photoshop I select the entire image (Select>All), and then copy it to memory, aka the Clipboard (Edit>Copy Merged).

Then, I open ComicLife, drag a panel over from the right column into the main drawing area of the page, stretch the panel out as large or as small as I want it to be, and paste (Edit>Paste). Voila! The combined image I created of myself and the president in Photoshop appears within the panel I set in ComicLife. Some clipping may occur, meaning depending on the height and width of the panel you made in ComicLife, you could inadvertently cut off the edges of the image you created in Photoshop. To minimize clipping, try to make your ComicLife panel about the same shape and size as your image in Photoshop.

In ComicLife, I click-drag speech bubbles with the mouse from the selection window at the bottom of the screen up to where I want to place them on the image. A few lines of text later and that’s it. All done. Lastly, I export my creation (File>Export>Export to Images) as a 72dpi (dots per inch) jpg file for easy upload to Pollyticks.com.

You Made a Political Cartoon

In future articles I intend to go into greater detail on how to use Macromedia Flash, Adobe Photoshop (and Photoshop Elements), ComicLife and digital drawing tablets to produce political cartoons and illustrations. For now, I hope you found this simple overview helpful.

Feel free to drop me a line with your questions or comments at bs@pollyticks.com. And please send me your own political cartoon creations. I’d like to start a page on Pollyticks.com with user-created cartoons. Stay tuned, fearless reader!