Here are my newest cartoons. Fans always tell me that they like to see my messy rough sketches, so here we go again.

Here’s my quick and dirty sequester cartoon sketch. I drew it up first in hard pencil, I wasn’t happy with my Obama so I drew over him in soft (darker) pencil, made a note to move his position, and fiddled with just how he should be twiddling his thumbs. I often don’t get things right the first time.

Then I drew it up in finished line art, in hard pencil on nice drafting vellum. This black and white line art image is what most people see in the newspaper and I always like the BW version best. I think about the heavy blacks to be sure the image pops and I saw that the speech balloons needed to be reversed to black to give the words more weight.

Then I saved it with the white background transparent, and colored behind the image in layers in Photoshop to get this …

The previous cartoon was about former Senator Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be Defense Secretary being held up by angry Republicans. I threw the sketch for this one away.  Sorry.  Here’s the black and white, which looks better.

I thought about how much cross-hatching to put into the elephant skin. Elephants have interesting, textural skin, and I think I got to the point where he started to look like a rhino – maybe I went too far. It was fun to draw, though.  Here it is in color.

And here it is a couple of days later in my local newspaper, The Santa Barbara News-Press – printed nicely this time. I like how they put my liberal cartoon sneering at wing-nut Linda Chavez’s Hagel-bashing column.

The previous one was about North Korea’s “Li’l Kim” annoying China with his missile and bomb tests. Here’s the rough sketch. You can see I fiddled with the position of the missile-cigar and the Panda’s hand.

Here is the black and white art. I made the missile-cigar smoke the only gray part of the image, so it would stand out as extra annoying.

… and here’s the color version, with a nice Chinese red background.

The previous cartoon is an oldie that I reposted with the news of Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. I drew this one the last time the College of Cardinals met to choose a new Pope and we were all told that the Cardinals don’t really pick the Pope, it is God picking the Pope through the Cardinals.  That struck me as funny.

It is pretty common for editorial cartoonists to use Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of God in editorial cartoons.  Here’s a recent one by Nate Beeler.

… and a conservative one by Rick McKee …

… but I digress. I should post the new cartoons more often! Here’s the previous one, Obama has GOP fleas.

I didn’t do a color version of this one.  That’s it – I’m all caught up!