Cartoon Effect Photoshop

If you have a copy of Photoshop CS2, CS3, CS4, or any other version and you want to create a cartoon effect, you need to remember two basic styles: tight and loose. If, however, you're looking for a website to cartoonize your pictures, you may want to see Cartoony.Me!

A tight style is marked by careful planning and controlled outlining and texturing. The cartoon looks as though it took hours to draw. And it probably did. Hugh Haynie among the editorial cartoonists draws in a tight style. Haynie also has a mannerism, not to be confused with style, which sets his work apart: a too small border out of which juts the major figure or prop in each cartoon.

A loose style is marked by seeping, carefree strokes. You get the feeling the cartoonist thoroughly enjoyed himself while he produced the drawing and that he didn’t spend much time on it. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t. Robert Osborn, whose work appeared for so many years in The New Republic, George Lichty, and Charles Saxon all draw in a loose style.

“If your drawing is simple, or doodle-like,” says Jules Feiffer, “it’s not because after considerable experience you’ve arrived at a shorthand style stating exactly what you want to state- without any extras at al. This takes a lot of time, it can take forever. I’m still trying to figure out my style.”

Often a loosely drawn cartoon you see in print resulted from several tries. And perhaps chunks of several drawings were pieced together to achieve the fresh, unlabored look.

For many years the loose style has been on the ascendancy. The roughs that gag cartoonists submitted to magazines were bought “as is” and sent directly to the engraver. As Lord Peter Wimsey is made to say in a Dorthy L. Sayers novel, Unnatural Death: “The rough sketch is frequently so much more convincing than the worked-up canvas.”

Paul Peter Porges, as a gag cartoonist changed from a tight, heave-line style- “The Grand Rapids School,” he calls it-to one much freer. “One has to be extremely flexible in this field,” he says. “You can’t be smug and say, I’ve got a good, cute, style and I’m going to exploit it and drain it to the end. You have to be with it, see what’s going on, and be aware of the handwriting on the wall. Always try to be one step ahead, as far as market potentialities are concerned. There’s no such thing as a secure style.”