Editorial Cartoon

The subject of the creation is an elephant holding a bag of money labeled "money from NRA" and saying "the solution is more guns." On the left side, there is a crowd of rednecks wearing t-shirts. One is labeled "guns don't kill people," but the n't at the end of don't is cut off. Another is labeled with the thin blue line flag (the flag of the blue lives matter movement). Next to it is another common conservative slogan: "Don't desecrate the flag." In the background, there is only a thin blue gradient. I made this using micron pens of varying sizes and prismacolor pencils. When I designed the piece, I used line to show shape, value and color to show form and texture, space to improve the composition, and balance.

When drawing this, I chose to use the rule of thirds to make sure the person looking at its eye's notice the smaller parts of the drawing such as the t-shirts. I decided to used formal balance and selective focus because it is common is editorial cartoons. This project started out as a rough sketch of my idea. So, I made several sketches of the different orientations of everything. And, I started drawing. I used pencil, then pen, then colored pencil.

Originally, I was going to get inspiration from one of the onion article I saw ("No way to prevent this" according to the only nation where this regularly happens). But, later, I decided to stay on the same topic but approach it a different way. One of the books I remember reading a long time ago was a book of political cartoons over time. I really liked reading through it and trying to understand the message and the context at the time. On the front page, I remember (this was a very long time ago so I don't know precisely) there was a cartoon of a politician standing with a bunch of bags of money behind a large poster with words on it. The caption read: "Name, a man who stands behind his words." When I thought of this, I remembered a Last Week Tonight video about the NRA and some other articles. This relates to my life because I enjoy drawing political cartoons and I think I improved a lot. I normally have a hard time drawing in the exaggerated style, standard of political cartoons, but I think I did well enough in this drawing. Even though I am content with this, there is several things that I will hopefully change before submitting it to scholastics:

• Doing it over again in watercolor or digitally
• Having some of the trunk show
• Neatening the handwriting
• Shading the bag of money better
• Making the t-shirts cleaner
• Making the entire piece cleaner
• Adding more highlights on the suit
• Making the blue in the thin blue line t-shirt actually blue
• Having less characters with the glasses (in this drawing its 3/4)
• Doing a more precise speech bubble