Prize-Winning Cartoonists Explain How They Do It

By: Dave Astor Some of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists' most innovative members demonstrated how they create their work at a Friday AAEC convention session here.

They included Nick Anderson, Clay Bennett, Matt Davies, and Steve Sack. The first three are Pulitzer Prize winners from 2005, 2002, and 2004, respectively, while Sack has been a Pulitzer finalist.

Sack, of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Creators Syndicate, does his cartoons in a "painterly" style. "Six years ago, I started a new hobby of oil painting," he said. "I did it just for fun, but it eventually started to affect my cartoons. About four months ago, I decided to apply painting principles to draw my color cartoons."

That doesn't mean Sack actually colors his cartoons with a paint brush. Rather, he uses Photoshop software to create drawings that look partly like Renaissance-era paintings and partly like modern cartoons.

Sack draws his entire cartoons digitally, unlike some AAECers who do a sketch before scanning the sketch into their computer.

Bennett, of The Christian Science Monitor and Christian Science Monitor News Service, is one of those who first sketches on paper. And while Sack is partial to bright colors in his cartoons, Bennett leans towards more muted colors to match the somber topics addressed by many of his cartoons.

Once his sketch is scanned, Bennett spends hours putting in shading, blurring background objects to make them look further away, and adding other effects in Photoshop. "I drop in color only in the last 20 minutes," said the AAEC president, noting that working in black, white, and gray for most of the process "gives me a better sense of dark and light" -- and enables him to see how his cartoons will look in newspapers that don't run them in color.

Bennett has a deadline of 11:30 a.m. So once he finishes a cartoon, he soon starts thinking of ideas for the next morning's drawing.

Matt Davies -- of The Journal News in White Plains, N.Y., and Tribune Media Services -- starts his workday by drinking a cup of coffee and sketching a picture of George W. Bush. "It primes the pump, even if I don't draw Bush that day," said the AAEC's immediate past president.

Davies does a lot of other sketches, and jots down words and phrases, in an effort to spark an idea. Once that idea comes, he draws the cartoon the old-fashioned way, sans computer. "I'm feeling like a dinosaur on this panel," said Davies, although he's younger than Bennett and Sack.

Anderson, of the Houston Chronicle and Washington Post Writers Group, is like Bennett in doing a sketch on paper before using the computer. Unlike Bennett and Sack, he uses Corel Painter software rather than Photoshop. For more on Anderson's artistic process, see the profile of the cartoonist in E&P's current June 2006 print magazine.