Filipinos First

Miriam Defensor Santiago

Miriam Defensor Santiago [born 15 June 1945] is a Filipino politician, notable for having served in all three branches of the Philippine government – judicial, executive, and legislative. Santiago was named one of The 100 Most Powerful Women in the World in 1997 by The Australian magazine. In 1988, she was named laureate of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for government service, with a citation “for bold and moral leadership in cleaning up a corrupt-ridden government agency.” She ran in the 1992 presidential elections but was defeated in an election marred by allegations of impropriety by the victor.

In 2012, she became the first Filipina and the first Asian from a developing country to be elected a judge of the International Criminal Court. She later resigned the post, citing chronic fatigue syndrome, which turned out to be lung cancer. She has also written books covering topics in law and the social sciences. She has served three terms in the Philippine Senate.

source: wikipedia

Senator Miriam Fistfight

tom richmond sketches

Inspirational caricature artist; Tom Richmond, born May 4, 1966, is an American freelance humorous illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist whose work has appeared in many national and international publications since 1990.

tom richmond

amy adams

angelina jolie

joe black

al bundy

david caruso

tom cruise

johnny depp

iggy

samuel jackson

jay leno

leonardo dicaprio

david letterman

david lynch

madonna

matt damon

carlos santana

snoopdoggiedog

 Tom Richmond [born May 4, 1966] is an American freelance humorous illustrator, cartoonist and caricaturist whose work has appeared in many national and international publications since 1990. He was chosen as the 2011 "Cartoonist of the Year" Reuben Award winner by the National Cartoonists Society. 

Some of Richmond's earliest publication work was for the comic book Married... with Children for NOW Comics, and the mini-series The Coneheads for Marvel Comics in the early 1990s. Specializing in caricature, he began doing editorial illustrations for magazines, art for advertising and CD-ROM graphics in 1992. In the late 1990s he had a brief stint at Cracked magazine before beginning to work for MAD magazine in 2000. Now a major contributor to MAD, Richmond's caricatures and cartoons illustrate many of MAD's trademark movie and TV parodies. He was the first illustrator in the modern (non-comic book) era to do his TV and film parodies in full color, coinciding with MAD's switch to a color format in 2001. In addition to MAD, Richmond continues to do freelance illustration for a variety of publications and advertising clients.

Richmond's work has also been seen in film and on television. He has a credit in the 2008 film Super Capers as an illustrator, having contributed caricature illustrations for opening credit and flashback animations for the movie. In 2010 he contributed animation character design for CGI animated segments in the film "I Want Your Money", as well as doing the one-sheet poster art. Also in 2010, he began contributing artwork and character design for the Cartoon Network animated show "MAD", based on the magazine.
Richmond has been honored with several awards, including Caricaturist of the Year twice, in 1998 and 1999 by the National Caricaturist Network and with a divisional Reuben award for Advertising Art in 2003, 2006 and 2007, and for Newspaper Illustration in 2009 from the National Cartoonists Society. In 2011, Richmond became the 34th president of the Society, succeeding Jeff Keane. NCS presidents are chosen for two-year terms.
Richmond designed the look of Achmed Junior, one of the puppets used by ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, which made his debut in Dunham's 2010 Identity Crisis tour, and made his first onscreen appearance in Dunham's 2011 Comedy Central special, Jeff Dunham: Controlled Chaos.
In 2011, Deadline Demon Publishing published Richmond's book on the art of drawing caricatures, The Mad Art of Caricature! A Serious Guide to Drawing Funny Faces.
On August 27, 2006, he appeared in the comic strip Pearls Before Swine. Richmond returned the favor by caricaturing the strip's creator Stephan Pastis inside a garbage can, in a 2006 issue of Mad. On December 30, 2012, he appeared in Mort Walker's comic strip Beetle Bailey.

source: wikipedia

Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists [1996]

Article source...

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, was a comic book artist who combined blinding speed with boundless imagination. He shaped the look of Alien, Empire Strikes Back and The Fifth Element. He reimagined the Silver Surfer for Stan Lee. And he is an acknowledged influence on everyone from Japanese animating great Hayao Miyazaki to sci-fi writer William Gibson.

In 1996, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada published a lecture given by Moebius called “Breve manual para historietistas”  – a brief manual for cartoonists – which consists of 18 tips for aspiring artists. If your Spanish isn’t up to snuff – mine certainly isn’t – then there are a couple translations out there. Someone called Xurxo g Penalta cranked out a direct version in English, but to get the true nuances of Moebius’ wise words, famed illustrator William Stout’s excellent annotated version is best.

For instance, Moebius’s first tip is “When you draw, you must first cleanse yourself of deep feelings, like hate, happiness, ambition, etc.”

Stout amplifies this with the following:

    These feelings are typically emotional prejudices that function as a block to creativity.

    This was something I learned from drawing and hanging out with another Frenchman, the brilliant cartoonist-illustrator (and regular Atlantic Monthly contributor) Guy Billout, when we were traveling together in Antarctica and Patagonia back in 1989. Until I spent time with Guy, I had no idea how many pre-conceived notions and assumptions I held within me regarding people and situations and what a block they were to the flow of my creativity.

    Divorcing yourself from such emotionally blinding pre-conceptions allows you to see things with fresh eyes. Solutions and ideas then flow with much greater ease. I have noticed with all the creative geniuses I have met that they all share a childlike delight with whatever or whomever they encounter in life (they can even find amusement in life’s villains). For them, all creative barriers are down; life and creative problem solving for them is like constantly playing. They gush great ideas all day long like a fountain.

All of Stout’s annotations are like this. It should be required reading for anyone even vaguely interested in visual storytelling. Below are Moebius’ original observations. Stout’s thoughts on Moebius can be found here.

    1) When you draw, you must first cleanse yourself of deep feelings, like hate, happiness, ambition, etc.

    2) It’s very important to educate your hand. Make it achieve a level of high obedience so that it will be able to properly and fully express your ideas. But be very careful of trying to obtain too much perfection, as well as too much speed as an artist. Perfection and speed are dangerous — as are their opposites. When you produce drawings that are too quick or too loose, besides making mistakes, you run the risk of creating an entity without soul or spirit.

    3) Knowledge of perspective is of supreme importance. Its laws provide a good, positive way to manipulate or hypnotize your readers.

    4) Another thing to embrace with affection is the study of [the] human body — it’s anatomy, positions, body types, expressions, construction, and the differences between people.

    Drawing a man is very different from drawing a woman. With males, you can be looser and less precise in their depiction; small imperfections can often add character. Your drawing of a woman, however, must be perfect; a single ill-placed line can dramatically age her or make her seem annoying or ugly. Then, no one buys your comic!

    For the reader to believe your story, your characters must feel as if they have a life and personality of their own.

    Their physical gestures should seem to emanate from their character’s strengths, weaknesses and infirmities. The body becomes transformed when it is brought to life; there is a message in its structure, in the distribution of its fat, in each muscle and in every wrinkle, crease or fold of the face and body. It becomes a study of life.

    5) When you create a story, you can begin it without knowing everything, but you should make notes as you go along regarding the particulars of the world depicted in your story. Such detail will provide your readers with recognizable characteristics that will pique their interest.

    When a character dies in a story, unless the character has had his personal story expressed some way in the drawing of his face, body and attire, the reader will not care; your reader won’t have any emotional connection.

    Your publisher might say, “Your story has no value; there’s only one dead guy — I need twenty or thirty dead guys for this to work.” But that is not true; if the reader feels the dead guy or wounded guys or hurt guys or whomever you have in trouble have a real personality resulting from your own deep studies of human nature — with an artist’s capacity for such observation — emotions will surge.

    By such studies you will develop and gain attention from others, as well as a compassion and a love for humanity.

    This is very important for the development of an artist. If he wants to function as a mirror of society and humanity, this mirror of his must contain the consciousness of the entire world; it must be a mirror that sees everything.

    6) Alejandro Jodorowsky says I don’t like drawing dead horses. Well, it is very difficult.

    It’s also very difficult to draw a sleeping body or someone who has been abandoned, because in most comics it’s always action that is being studied. It’s much easier to draw people fighting — that’s why Americans nearly always draw superheroes. It’s much more difficult to draw people that are talking, because that’s a series of very small movements — small, yet with real significance.

    His counts for more because of our human need for love or the attention of others. It’s these little things that speak of personality, of life. Most superheroes don’t have any personality; they all use the same gestures and movements.

    7) Equally important is the clothing of your characters and the state of the material from which it was made.

    These textures create a vision of your characters’ experiences, their lives, and their role in your adventure in a way where much can be said without words. In a dress there are a thousand folds; you need to choose just two or three — don’t draw them all. Just make sure you choose the two or three good ones.

    8) The style, stylistic continuity of an artist and its public presentation are full of symbols; they can be read just like a Tarot deck. I chose my name “Moebius” as a joke when I was twenty-two years old — but, in truth, the name came to resonate with meaning. If you arrive wearing a T-shirt of Don Quixote, that tells me who you are. In my case, making a drawing of relative simplicity and subtle indications is important to me.

    9) When an artist, a real working artist, goes out on the street, he does not see things the same way as “normal” people. His unique vision is crucial to documenting a way of life and the people who live it.

    10) Another important element is composition. The compositions in our stories should be studied because a page or a painting or a panel is a face that looks at the reader and speaks to him. A page is not just a succession of insignificant panels. There are panels that are full. Some that are empty. Others are vertical. Some horizontal. All are indications of the artist’s intentions. Vertical panels excite the reader. Horizontals calm him. For us in the Western world, motion in a panel that goes from left to right represents action heading toward the future. Moving from right to left directs action toward the past. The directions we indicate represent a dispersion of energy. An object or character placed in the center of a panel focuses and concentrates energy and attention. These are basic reading symbols and forms that evoke in the reader a fascination, a kind of hypnosis. You must be conscious of rhythm and set traps for the reader to fall into so that, when he falls, he gets lost, allowing you to manipulate and move him inside your world with greater ease and pleasure. That’s because what you have created is a sense of life. You must study the great painters, especially those who speak with their paintings. Their individual painting schools or genres or time periods should not matter. Their preoccupation with physical as well as emotional composition must be studied so that you learn how their combination of lines works to touch us directly within our hearts.

    11) The narration must harmonize with the drawings. There must be a visual rhythm created by the placement of your text. The rhythm of your plot should be reflected in your visual cadence and the way you compress or expand time. Like a filmmaker, you must be very careful in how you cast your characters and in how you direct them. Use your characters or “actors” like a director, studying and then selecting from all of your characters’ different takes.

    12) Beware of the devastating influence of North American comic books. The artists in Mexico seem to only study their surface effects: a little bit of anatomy mixed with dynamic compositions, monsters, fights, screaming and teeth. I like some of that stuff too, but there are many other possibilities and expressions that are also worthy of exploration.

    13) There is a connection between music and drawing. The size of that connection depends upon your personality and what’s going on at that moment. For the last ten years I’ve been working in silence; for me, there is music in the rhythm of my lines. Drawing at times is a search for discoveries. A precise, beautifully executed line is like an orgasm!

    14) Color is a language that the graphic artist uses to manipulate his reader’s attention as well as to create beauty. There is objective and subjective color. The emotional states of the characters can change or influence the color from one panel to the next, as can place and time of day. Special study and attention must be paid to the language of color.

    15) At the beginning of an artist’s career, he should principally involve himself in the creation of very high quality short stories. He has a better chance (than with long format stories) of successfully completing them, while maintaining a high standard of quality. It will also be easier to place them in a book or sell them to a publisher.

    16) There are times when we knowingly head down a path of failure, choosing the wrong theme or subject for our capabilities, or choosing a project that is too large, or an unsuitable technique. If this happens, you must not complain later.

    17) When new work has been sent to an editor and it receives a rejection, you should always ask for and try to discover the reasons for the rejection. By studying the reasons for our failure, only then can we begin to learn. It is not about struggle with our limitations, with the public or with the publishers. One should treat it with more of an aikido approach. It is the very strength and power of our adversary that is used as the key to his defeat.

    18) Now it is possible to expose our works to readers in every part of the planet. We must always keep aware of this. To begin with, drawing is a form of personal communication — but this does not mean that the artist should close himself off inside a bubble. His communication should be for those aesthetically, philosophically and geographically close to him, as well as for himself — but also for complete strangers. Drawing is a medium of communication for the great family we have not met, for the public and for the world.

The Cult Japanese Filmmaker That Inspired Darren Aronofsky

Anime maverick Satoshi Kon’s work has made its way into countless other films that have reinterpreted his unmatchable style. Read more...

Astro Boy

Astro Boy, known in Japan by its original name Mighty Atom [Japanese: 鉄腕アトム Hepburn: Tetsuwan Atomu?], is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka from 1952 to 1968. The story follows the adventures of an android named Astro Boy and a selection of other characters.

The manga was adapted for TV as Astro Boy, the first popular animated Japanese television series that embodied the aesthetic that later became familiar worldwide as anime. After enjoying success abroad, Astro Boy was remade in the 1980s as New Mighty Atom, known as Astroboy in other countries, and again in 2003. In November 2007, he was named Japan's envoy for overseas safety. An American computer-animated film based on the original manga series by Tezuka was released on October 23, 2009. In March 2015, a trailer was released announcing a new cartoon series.

source: wikipedia

In Search of Moebius (BBC 4 Documentary)

Incal, Arzach, & Internal Transfer

Paul Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock [January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956], known professionally as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was well known for his unique style of drip painting.

During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety; he was a major artist of his generation. Regarded as reclusive, he had a volatile personality, and struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy.

Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. In December 1956, several months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honored with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.

source: wikipedia

Sebastian Krüger

Sebastian Krüger [born June 30, 1963 in Hamelin, Germany] is a German artist. Sebastian Krüger was born in Hamelin in 1963. After studying free painting with Prof. Dörfler at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts he made a stunning reputation as the designer of a number of cover spreads for the press in Germany and abroad and as an illustrator and creative designer of various LP covers. He then stepped away from commercial work and devoted himself solely to free painting. Artistically he has developed, in recent years, away from the early role of the so-called "star caricaturist" to that of a star of the New Pop Realism. His artistic visions are treasured and collected by other stars of the pop scene, like the Rolling Stones, who are friends of his, and by art connoisseurs all over the world.

In the quarter century of his creative career Krüger has remained true to the ideal of a New Pop Art, dedicating his art to a kind of game of deception, the interplay of identity and pose, of authenticity and fiction. This has enabled him to establish himself as a popular painter whose works draw large numbers of visitors to the galleries and museums. The defining feature of his work is creative reflection about the apparatus of media presentation and the manic iconography of contemporary picture production. His FACES are a kindly meant but thoroughly subversive tribute to the world of beautiful appearances and to the rock and pop culture of the sixties, with which the painter has cultivated an almost ritualistic relationship. According to his own comment on his work ["Everything is in transition, that's all"] he has devoted himself for some years, with the same artistic passion as before, to the reworking of the private world of his childhood.

The artist lives and works near Hanover and in California.

His primary medium is acrylic paint, and his paintings are hyper-realistic in detail, yet also extremely grotesque in their distortion. The Times praised him for "capturing the essence of his subjects" in his renderings. He is well known for his lifelike depictions of The Rolling Stones, in particular, Keith Richards.

The Genius Of Ely Santiago

Article by: Hannah A. Papasin

I remember Coffee Cats.

I remember how two disembodied heads are talking to each other about practically anything under the sun, even the sun itself.  I remember the snark.  I remember the sarcasm of the guy on the left (always on the left) as he comments about the idiosyncrasies of life and the idiocy of the people running it.

Most of all, I remember the genius of Ely Santiago.

It was the 90’s when I first gotten hold of The Philippine Daily Inquirer.  I had this habit of discarding the front pages and going straight to the Funnies (yeah, I was quite the intellectual).  Then I noticed it.  At the bottom left of the paper, just above the Crossword Puzzle.  Two guys sharing coffee, talking about the Spratleys.  Pure coffee table convo  – with a punchline.

That was how I was introduced to Ely Santiago – and I immediately became a fan.   For a fan, though, I know so little about him.  I didn’t know, for instance, that he was the one who coined the term “MassKara” for the Bacolod festival, or that he was president of the Art Association of Bacolod.  I don’t know him as much as, say, his brods in the Beta Sigma Fraternity or his classmates in UP Diliman.

Still, that does not mean that I couldn’t pay my respects to the man, the genius who unfortunately left us in 1993 at the not-quite-ripe age of 52.  Which was a pity because the man could have done more, so much more than most run-of-the-mill cartoonists.

Fellow blogger and graphic artist Lee Santiago, Ely’s son, said Coffee Cats was his father’s “advocacy, his voice”, his own means of making a statement to the world.

“My father always did cartoons and comic strips since his college days at UP Diliman,” Lee shares, adding he had always admired Ely’s brand of wit which he describes as “biting sarcasm and the humor” that is, alas, conspicuously absent in most cartoonists.

Bacolod recently paid tribute to the man – along with other artists who made contributions to the celebration of the yearly MassKara Festival – in a group exhibit titled Lagaw-lagaw sa MassKara at the New Government Center.  The exhibit opened during the second week of October.

It was just right.

After all, very few artists can lay claim to the title “genius”.

And clearly as caricaturist, painter and social commentator, Ely Santiago deserves (that’s with the present tense) the label more than any other.

see also: Remembering Ely Santiago

Living Works Of Art In The Rice Paddies Of Japan

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Art Portfolio of Illustrator Jason Seiler

Stan Lee

Stan Lee [born Stanley Martin Lieber, December 28, 1922] is an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, media producer, television host, actor, and former president and chairman of Marvel Comics.

In collaboration with several artists, including Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, he co-created Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, the X-Men, and many other fictional characters, introducing complex, naturalistic characters and a thoroughly shared universe into superhero comic books. In addition, he headed the first major successful challenge to the industry's censorship organization, the Comics Code Authority, and forced it to reform its policies. Lee subsequently led the expansion of Marvel Comics from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation.

He was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. Lee received a National Medal of Arts in 2008.

Stanley Martin Lieber was born on December 28, 1922 in New York City, in the apartment of his Romanian-born Jewish immigrant parents, Celia [née Solomon] and Jack Lieber, at the corner of West 98th Street and West End Avenue in Manhattan. His father, trained as a dress cutter, worked only sporadically after the Great Depression, and the family moved further uptown to Fort Washington Avenue, in Washington Heights, Manhattan. When Lee was nearly 9, his only sibling, brother Larry Lieber, was born. He said in 2006 that as a child he was influenced by books and movies, particularly those with Errol Flynn playing heroic roles. By the time Lee was in his teens, the family was living in a one-bedroom apartment at 1720 University Avenue in the Bronx. Lee described it as "a third-floor apartment facing out back", with him and his brother sharing a bedroom and his parents using a foldout couch.

Lee attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. In his youth, Lee enjoyed writing, and entertained dreams of one day writing The Great American Novel. He has said that in his youth he worked such part-time jobs as writing obituaries for a news service and press releases for the National Tuberculosis Center; delivering sandwiches for the Jack May pharmacy to offices in Rockefeller Center; working as an office boy for a trouser manufacturer; ushering at the Rivoli Theater on Broadway; and selling subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. He graduated from high school early, aged 16½ in 1939, and joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project.

source: wikipedia