Make Me Into A Cartoon For Free

In our series of hubs on learning how to make cartoons for free, our topic for this hub is about counterfeit styles. However, if you're looking for a place to cartoon yourself for free, Cartoony.Me would be the best!

The Mother Earth News in its first issue said that “…you will find that the best cartoon instruction in the whole world is only as far away as the nearest printed cartoon.” As this magazine saw it, the beginning cartoonist can simply lift a little something from three or four cartoonists he admires, and presto! He has a style of his own. Which is precisely what many second and third rate cartoonists have done.

Even more reprehensible has been the practice of some beginning cartoonists to study the work of a single cartoonist, duplicate it verbatim, and then set out to cash in on it. What satisfaction can there be, aside from the monetary, in devoting one’s career to the production of counterfeits?

Almost never does the imitation capture the flavor of the original. A rival panel to Grin and Bear It didn’t come close to duplicating the relaxed artistry of George Lichty. The several advertising illustrators who try to duplicate the sweeping brush or pencil strokes of New Yorker contributor Charles Saxon don’t fool the connoisseur. Sometimes the imitators become so numerous that the style itself, even in the hands of the originator, grows tiresome. Pat Oliphant, the Washington Star editorial cartoonist, and Jack Davis and Mort Drucker, the Mad cartoonists, to some extent suffer from overexposure brought on by their countless imitators.

Not that the beginning cartoonist does not derive some benefit from imitation. “We all begin by imitation,” says Milton Glaser, the designer/illustrator and a founder of Push Pin Studios in New York. “The Penalty for consistent imitation, unfortunately, is the erosion of personal vision and artistic sensibility.”

The secret is for the cartoonist to do his imitating at the early stages of his development and for only a short period of time. He should move out on his own as soon as possible, determined to infuse his work with his own personality, with the thought of eventually developing a style different enough from any other to be instantly recognizable.