November 16, 2006
This week has been pretty easy in terms of finding a subject to cartoon on. Given the municipal elections we had early on this week there’s been plenty of fodder to satirize. Today’s cartoon focuses on Brad Clark, a feisty ex-provincial cabinet minister who might very well turn City Hall upside down in the next 4 years before moving up to the Mayor’s chair. Anyway, we’re bound to read a lot of headlines involving this new addition to City Hall, enough to deem his presence worthy of an editorial cartoon. Gut instinct is a part of what drives a cartoonist to pick his subject matter. Consider that as the foundation of what goes into an editorial cartoon. Here’s what happens after I get an idea for a cartoon:
Forgive the blurriness of the above images, but you get the point. After the cartoon is done it needs to go through a range of format processes. My newspaper requires a colour cartoon formatted as an EPS image at a resolution of 300 dpi in a rectangular shape of 496 X 378 points, the colour mode being CMYK which allows me to separate the blacks from the colours for a crisper image. My website requires a 72 dpi low res JPEG version of what my newspaper gets in the RGB mode. It also gets a small thumbnail image for that related cartoon feature I have beneath each main cartoon. My syndicate wants a 300 dpi JPEG image in RGB at 7.5 inches across (but they won’t get a version of this one because of its local subject matter.) A high resolution version at 600 dpi in a JPEG format goes to my personal archive for possible future use.
