November 25, 2009
Worked all afternoon yesterday on the the Blazing Pols illustration. After some 35 sketches, finally got a decent looking drawing of a gunfighting elephant at about two:

Utilizing the old spreading-lead-on-the-back-of-tracing-paper trick, I transferred that sketch to an expensive sheet of Essdee Scratchboard ($22 a sheet) and laid in the fightingi elephant and the head of the dying jackass:

So far, so good (yes, I changed the derby into an Uncle Sam hat because I knew that Dan The Man will probably want to carve that hat and put it in front of the True West logo). Unfortunately I had drawn myself into a corner (something I'm very good at). Although the editorial style cartoon I'm emulating harkens to the 1890s and early 1900s, the fight itself took place in 1871, so now I'm facing a dilemma. If an editorial cartoonist was drawing a cartoon of a fight that took place thirty years earlier, would he make the weapons authentic to that time? Perhaps, but this is supposed to be an allegorical representation of the fight, like you would see in a daily newspaper. Still, this is True West, so I opted for a percussion Colt as the jackass's weapons:

Rather than blunder onto the Essdee Scratchboard and try and fake my way through the pistol grips and frock coat folds, I decided to go into work this morning and have our production manager Robert Ray take a model jackass out in the back and pose those effects:

Now that is one fine jackass pose.

"He was grinnin' like a jackass eatin' prickly pear."
—Old Vaquero Saying