This Thursday, March 10, the grand state of Vermont will name James Kochalka as its first Cartoonist Laureate. More information about the position can be found at Vermont’s own Center for Cartoon Studies website. The title was conceived and advocated by CCS’s founder James Sturm. I was lucky enough to be in the right room when he was looking for somebody to design an official seal to accompany the honor.

When somebody is crowned Laureate, an obvious choice of leaf with which to adorn the title is laurel. The freakin root of the friggin word, alright? Cartooning has something to do with ink and with panels, Vermont has something to do with mountains, and above you see some variations on these themes. Before I got to sketching, James and I also talked about incorporating an image of the exhaulted cartoonist honored for each three-year term into the design itself. Some demented version of Kochalka’s American Elf self-portrait therefore found its way into many of these drawings.

Sturm added some information to my first doodle (top-left in the previous image). We discussed replacing the shield at the bottom of the design with just an ink pot. We also decided that we’d make two versions of the crest, one with the descriptive text encircled by the laurels, and one with the Kochalka elf head replacing at least the “Vermont Cartoonist Laureate” language. While we talked, James (Sturm, that is) also recommended some places to eat in Seattle.

I went off and drew this. To me, the graphic needed to feel as if it had all the weight and power of officialdom. I was searching for something Victorian and Protestant-ly New England in the rigor of its details. Perhaps that’s what led me to draw something approaching an actual laurel branch, rather than the iconic version seen on metals, crests, plaques and coins since the Roman Empire.

With some digital tom-foolery, the initial pencil sketch looked like this. We went through several drafts back and forth, redrawing the laurels and the ink, moving the honoree’s name into a banner (and actually spelling it right… and “cartoonist” too, while we were at it).

Most of these changes I made on the computer, so I printed the eventual approved “pencils” in blue ink onto Bristol board so I could move on to the final inks. James (still Sturm) and I agreed that, while the design should suggest historical significance and time-honored government institutions in its staid nature, it should also have it’s heel firmly planted in the world of cartooning, and be drawn by a brush dipped in ink.

To lend the original art a certain touch of being discovered in a forgotten Congressional flat file, I signed the work for both of us in a sort of old-fashioned manor. The finished piece blends elements of nineteenth- and mid-twentieth- century hand-made design, and is hopefully an intriguing blend of fun and stodgy.

The last, delightful touch, of sticking that little James Kochalka elf right on top of his banner, was a Sturm move. It kept the thing from becoming too serious, while balancing the black of the ink well. That’s why he’s James Sturm, and this was how the Vermont Cartoonist Laureate seal came to be.

That’s right, you guessed it! I’ve made a long-overdue update to my portfolio page, with…

1 | A T-shirt design for my broseph Dan’s band, BGosh. I drew this back in November, and I just got word that after many delays, it’s being printed.
2 | The cover to an anthology published by Foreign Affairs featuring essays from the magazine.
3 | Another banner for another adventure in the History of Deeds done beyond the Sea by Joseph Kopta.

On another note, a particularly astute reader/father pointed out that I have a certain penchant for the word “bittersweet.” Some research in the Frog Blog archives located in the basement of the Pat Barrett Center for Introspection at Solipsist University has revealed that, yes, I might have exhausted the term. The study revealed five instances of the contraction, three of them in the past summer alone. All efforts will be made to expand the Frog Blog vocabulary and find another way to express the joy and sadness felt especially at parties and events marking departures.

I’ve been thinking about doing one of those conception-to-finish blog posts that are so popular with illustrators these days. Would that be lame? Does anybody care what how some kid’s thought process/drawing process works? Is it really any different from anybody else’s? They only ever differ in the details. I guess I’m talking myself out of it. I dunno. I’m working on a wrap-around cover for the first issue of my comics anthology I’m calling Oak & Linden. And it’s pretty awesome. And it’s on much bigger paper than I’ve used since, like, sophomore year at Pratt. I was thinking maybe I’d post the process. Is that so lame???

How do you like this string of rhetorical questions? Is it obvious I’m enjoying writing a blog post again? And have you been wondering what else I’ve been doing other than messing around with WordPress and learning snatches of CSS and PHP as I go along for all these months? The answer is mostly doing illustration work for TheBigMoney.com. The Big Money is owned by Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive which has a pretty restrictive contract wherein I can’t publish my illustrations for them until three months after they do. However! As far as I can tell, I still own the sketches. I’d like to show them to you. (The first three will all be on PB dot C in the next week and a half. Since the second one was published a month before the first, it already is.)

First, an unpublished first draft for my first Big Money piece ever (and so far the only one I’ve done for an article by BFF Chad), “The War on Endowments.” I was still getting used to the flexibility of doing a drawing for a website, where I can sorta do whatever size I want, and this was much too big and would shrink down to an indecipherable blob. This was also the one time I had more than a day to illustrate, so I had the chance to start over.

And here we have the ink drawing for the one illustration that was online more than three months ago, about the way advertising is creeping into content on TV. I’m letting the whole universe in on a secret here: I did this one completely at my internet cafe place of part-time business. I had to run to Utrecht and buy pencils and Microns, and drew on a scrap piece of laser copier paper.

Next is a sketch for an article about who has the next big idea for tax policy.

Then a digi sketch for a story about Windows Vista not being all that bad. Here I discovered that a monitor can be a lightbox. Having traced the basic composition of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People with my Wacom, I was all, Shit, how am I gonna get the final on paper lickety-split? Then I taped my Bristol board onto the plastic frame around my screen, et voila! I reeeally hoped the headline would be “Vivre la Vista,” but it was “Vista Rules.”

This is a concept that came from Big Mon editorial, of lawyer vultures circling over dying businesses, but having slim pickings. I stuck ‘em in a tree. I did the final with the fake silkscreen texture of that The Wire drawing I posted previously, and soon realized that this fanciness makes my files ten times bigger than they used to be. Woopsos! I had to send a substantially lower-res final than I had been, but oh well, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal.

And finally, the New Year feature about the five worst days (economically speaking) of 2008. Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson are crying in the New Year hoping things can’t get any worse. Well here’s hoping…and speaking of which we only have four days to go before a certain terrorist fist jabber takes office!