Entries Tagged as 'how-to'
Add Images to Email Newsletters – Video Tutorial
One of the best uses of my new cartoon subscriptions is email newsletters.
Cartoons are perfect for email newsletters where increasing opens by tenths of a percent is a big deal. So enjoy this short video, and consider pepping up your content and keeping your readers engaged by adding relevant and entertaining cartoons.
Video transcript:
Hi there, this is Mark Anderson from andertoons.com. And I’m here to show you in this short video how to add cartoons or really any other kind of image to your email newsletter. It’s a great way to encourage readership and sharing and it’s really easy to do, so let’s get started.
We’re going to use three different email newsletter providers here, we’re going to use - I'm going to show you how to use Constant Contact, we’re also going to use AWeber, and then we’re going to do MailChimp. MailChimp is the one I’m most familiar with, so we’re going to end with that one and finish strong. These other two if I fumble just a little bit bear with me, I’m not as used to them, but they are all similar and it’s really easy to do.
So, here we are in Constant Contact and we are going to create an email. Let’s pick a nice template here. We’re going to pick business. And here comes our readymade business template with all sorts of nice stock photography and places to put our text.
So, we’re going to get a cartoon and put it into the first article, it's this one right here under article headline, and we’re going to click into the article block and then you can see we can go in here and highlight text that’s where we would write our article but we are concerned with the image, so we’re going to go over here where they have a space already for us to insert our image and we’re going to double click. Now don’t worry, it’s telling us that there are no images found but that’s only because we don’t have any images uploaded yet. So, what we’re going to do is click the upload image button. And we’re going to click select files and here I have all kinds of cartoons, I’ve got one picked up that we’re going to use, I’ll show it to you here. "I’m working harder on working smarter so I don’t have to work so hard," and that’s the cartoon we’re going to use during click open and that’s going to upload that cartoon and we can add a description here if we want I’m not going to do that and press done and there is our image.
We can add a caption below it, again image description, we can make it a clickable link if you had this image say on your blog or on your website, when people clicked out in their newsletter it would be a way to get them over to your website. So we can also increase the size here... The maximum dimension for this particular template is 400 wide but you can go all sorts of different dimensions and it keeps the block so it keeps the dimensions correct and you also align it left, right or center. So, we’re going to go, we’ll go 350-ish here and we’ll insert that image. You could also change the size right in here so there you could see like before there wasn’t a whole lot of text that we can put over on that left side but now we can resize it and that looks very nice indeed. If you wanted to take up the entire width you can go to fit to block and that will fill up the whole work there. Really easy to do, of course you do want to remember to click save, now we are going to click save and that block in our newsletter is done, we have a great cartoon there and I’m sure people would enjoy reading that and then the article immediately below it. So, real easy, that’s Constant Contact, that’s adding a cartoon to our newsletter there.
Alright. Let’s go to AWeber. We’re going to do a new HTML message here, wait for that to load, let’s see which one should we do, this Leaf Wiggle looks nice, we’ll do this one, okay. Here comes our preformatted newsletter oh that’s very nice and again similar to Constant Contact they have a place all ready for us to add our image. So, we are going to double click on that and then we don’t have images again here in our library so we are going to upload a file. We will get that same cartoon and we are uploading it and there it is. We will change the size, you can see it’s pixelated a little bit but that’s because we are using the thumbnail, if you click original that will get us to the original size and then we can resize that at a good quality there, so you can see that looks very nice and we could align it center or right or left again we can put it in the link there is alt text for SEO and we will just click out of there and that looks very nice in that article indeed I think people would enjoy seeing that there and that’s pretty easy. So, you can see it’s very similar between the programs in fact we will go over here to MailChimp now.
And again very similar. We’re going to click in this block of text here to our Generitech customers and click at it. And we’re going to put this in between these two paragraphs and then we’re going to go to file manager, I think I already have this image, yes I do, I already have this image because I use MailChimp, I already had this in my library and again we’re going to keep these proportions, we’ll keep it at the size that it is originally but you can change that. You can align it left or right or text URL these are all very standard things, I’d like clicking opening a new window if I’m going to have the URL because that keeps your other window open. So, we’re going to save and insert image and you can see it’s showing us that are put it right in there and we’re going to go up back up here and click save now and doesn’t that look nice, right to our Generitech customers. They will have a nice message from us and a funny cartoon to keep them entertained and informed and opening their email newsletters from us every month.
So there it is, it's very simple to add a cartoon to your email newsletter, people love them, they are great for encouraging people to open and read them and keep coming back. If people know there is a cartoon in your newsletter there is a much better chance they are going to open that because they want to see the funny cartoon again this month. People love to share cartoons, people love to send them to their friends, isn't this funny, it’s a great way to give your email newsletter and even greater reach than you expect it.
So, that’s it. I hope that you enjoyed it and please visit andertoons.com where you can purchase cartoons individually or you can subscribe to a monthly subscription of cartoons, there's a couple of different plans there and you can use all of the cartoons you want for email newsletters, presentations and what have you. So thank you very much and I hope you enjoyed it.
The Freelance Cartoonist And Self-Promotion
The modern freelance cartoonist is also, de facto, a self-promoter. You want and need to tell people about your cartoons and comics. After all, people can't buy your cartoons or hire you if they don't know you exist. The question is how best to spend your time, effort, and money to get the word out?
I've dipped my toe in older, more traditional marketing waters (agencies, postcards, cold-calling...), but by far the most success I've experienced has been online. This can't be surprising, but it warrants the occasional revisit, and I like to think I bring some real experience to the table. I've been blogging since before my developer had heard the word "blog," and tweeting well before everyone knew the 140 character limit.
So here are some online options for the savvy freelance cartoonist and how I use or don't use them (your results may vary):
Your Website
Please tell me you have a website, or a blog, or something. If not, stop reading this article right now and go take care of that. It doesn't need to be fancy, but it needs to look professional. You can't promote yourself if you don't have somewhere to send people.
Your Blog
Blogging has been around a while, and it's probably out of fashion, but it's also an easy and effective way to create, present and organize a lot of content. If you have a site, a blog is a great addition. If you need a site, a blog can be a great way to do that too. I like WordPress personally, but there's always Blogger or Tumblr.
I used to try to put a little something out every day, but this year I've been trying one really good in-depth post per week and I've been happier with the results.
Embeds & RSS
One of the ways I promote my cartoons from my site is to allow various embedding options and RSS feeds. This is the sort of thing where you'll probably need a good developer to make it work, but making it easy for people to share your cartoons helps a lot.
Here's an example of a cartoon from my site that I embedded in this blog post:
Click on the cartoon and you go to the page where you can buy it. There's also a text link to give the search engines something to chew on. I also have an option where people can embed a daily cartoon thumbnail in their website or blog's sidebar. It's fun content for them, and some attention and a link for me.
Add to that my twenty or so RSS feeds sorted by topic, and there's plenty of ways for people to get their daily cartoon fix.
Again, these options are more along the hire-a-good-developer route, but if you can do any or all of them, I'd recommend it.
This is an area where I can dovetail some of my efforts. I take the daily cartoon RSS feed and route it through Feedburner to repackage it as a daily subscribable email. It requires almost no maintenance on my part and it's a cinch to set up.
Email is one method you should not discount or take for granted. When I recently changed how my images were being hosted and it created a small glitch for my daily email cartoon subscribers, the deluge of emails asking when it would be fixed was staggering. The inbox is a place you want to be.
There's all flavor of social media out there, but the one that fits my personal palate best is Twitter. It's fun, quick, and easily sharable, just like a cartoon.
To organize people I'm following and to get tweets out quickly I use Hootsuite:
As far as tweeting goes, my general strategy with Twitter is 20% me, 80% other people. Using Buffer I schedule a daily cartoon tweet for mornings, and then 4 other retweets of stuff I like throughout the day. I again dovetail the process using IFTTT to push starred blog posts from Google Reader into my Buffer queue:
I also tweet more depending on the day and my schedule. And Twitter's integration into iOS makes things even easier now. I love me some Twitter.
I should do more with Facebook, but to be perfectly honest, there's something about it that just rubs me the wrong way.
There are people who are doing great things here, and you should probably figure out what they're doing and how, but for the time being I'm just forwarding my tweets here.
Google+
I was hot on Google+ for a while, and considering it's almost certainly influencing Google's search results in all sorts of ways I should be putting in more time here. But I haven't seen a lot back for my efforts, and there's only so much social media I can tackle in a day.
Pinterest was another thing I was really excited about. A few months before it really hit big I noticed it in my Google Analytics as a referrer and checked it out.
For a while I was seeing a lot of traffic from it, but as it grew and people began to figure out how to game it a little more, that's dropped considerably.
That being said I still like the occasional pinning binge, and I do see my cartoons appear on it regularly:
But as a place to put a lot of effort, I'm not convinced.
YouTube
Video is a fantastic way to connect with people, and YouTube is obviously king in this arena. My strategy here is to create around one good size video per month while, more or less, doing what I normally do.
For example, with a camera mount clipped to my lamp, an iPhone, and a little time in iMovie, I made this short video of myself inking:
Not bad, not a lot more work, and, I think, very effective.
Flickr
Although Flickr seems to have floundered in Instagram's hipstery shadow, I still think it's one of those important places you should have a presence.
I've used it mostly as a way to host pics of my large collection of cartoon themed trading cards. I'd blog about a set, show one pic, and then route people to Flickr to see the rest.
Do I see a lot of traffic from Flickr? Not really. Do I think it influences search results? Somewhat. Do I hope Marissa Mayer and company restore it to its former innovative glory? Definitely.
Other Sites
In addition the usual suspects above, a good freelance cartoonist should be looking for other more unique opportunities to partner with other sites. For example, every Friday for the past couple of years I've had a business-themed cartoon at Small Business Trends. They get relevant and entertaining content, I get some great links and access to a large readership. Everyone's happy:
I also have a daily cartoon over at GoComics where I'm at just around 3000 subscribers as I write this:
I also submit regularly to Illustration Friday:
I haven't even mentioned Reddit, StumbleUpon, or Kickstarter, and as soon as I click Publish this list will most likely be obsolete, but it's a good place for a freelance cartoonist to start.
Find what works for you, do it regularly, and get noticed.
Cartoon Shading in Photoshop – Cartooning Tutorial
Normally when I shade a cartoon I use my good old Prismacolor cool greys. But lately I've been doing a lot of custom cartoons where a client could ask for changes to the final art, so I shade in Photoshop using some custom patterns I made from those aforementioned Prismacolors.
It's not glamorous, and there's certainly more educational Photoshop tutorials available, but if you want to see a cartoonist laying down some shading while watching MST3K: The Movie, here you go:
Video Transription
Hi there, this is Mark Anderson from Andertoons.com and I am going to show you how I shade a cartoon in Photoshop. The first thing I do is I use an action that I had created to move all of my layers around, I will show you how to do that some other time, but what it does is it moves the ink to the top layer and then creates some layers underneath that makes the ink layer a multiply layer. I also created some patterns here for myself using my markers and the paper that I normally use and I scanned that in and created some patterns to emulate what I would normally do.
The reason I am not shading this using my regular marker and papers that I would use for my regular cartoons, is this is a custom cartoon that I am doing for a client, so I like to use my Photoshop markers so that I can create layer after layer after layer and then if the client requires something different or like a person’s hair color changed or we need to do this or that, I can go back and change it without having to redraw the original art, so that’s why I am doing this.
And of course I’ve got Mystery Science Theater 3000 The Movie playing over here on the right side. Shading isn’t my favorite thing to do, it’s sort of a necessary evil, so when I have a lot of shading to do - poor Dr. Forrester - I put a movie on sort of in a little window there to, that I can listen to or you know tune into here and there again.
So here I am shading, let me get back to the actual shading part; I use again my pattern brush and the eraser, those are the two tools that I really use when I create different layers. So this first layer here is sort of a light grey, I think it is a 30% grey, for her hair and for the computer here. Now I have created another layer and I am going to use a slightly darker pattern for the chair, so it is pretty simple, you just sort of lay the shading in as nicely as you can - now I see the, because I put that layer underneath the other layer when I color over by that computer that shading goes underneath that layer so that you can’t see it.
This is pretty standard Photoshop coloring shading sort of thing, but if you do not, you know if you do not know you know how…I am going to choose another slightly darker color for his chair to sort of make him pop a little bit. I’ve noticed sometimes I have problems, I use a Wacom tablet, and sometimes it seems like it has a problem, maybe it is Photoshop, maybe it’s the tablet recognizing like that I want a variable brush size and I have all the settings set up correctly I am pretty sure, and sometimes it just, it does not seem to recognize it, I don’t know what that is - if anybody knows, if there is something that I am missing here let me know, I would appreciate it.
So I am sort of erasing around his arm here and getting this shading more and more correct and this is going pretty well, there is actually not a whole lot to shade in this cartoon, which is why I chose it, sometimes especially with a crowd scene, or something like that there can be a lot a lot a lot of shading and I did not want to show you half an hour of ‘look, I am shading, now I am erasing, now I am shading, now I am erasing, now I am shading, now I am erasing’, this is already going to be tedious enough, but I will try to make it interesting for you.
So I think I am on my third layer now, and again I’ve taken that third layer and put it underneath the first two, the ink layer on top is set to multiply so that you can see things under the ink. And then I do my shading layers underneath that and they are all set to normal and then I have a background layer of just pure white. And then of course I have other layers for laying in the captions, and other things. There was another layer for that eBay logo but I had just merged that in there.
Okay, doing a little detail there on the desk making sure that that all makes sense. I left her shirt and her phone white because the desk and the chair have already been shaded. Okay I am just doing a little bit of detail work on the supposed eBay page. It doesn’t need to be detailed there, in fact it’s better if it is not because you don’t want people asking ‘oh what is she looking at, is she looking at a purse, is she looking at a toy, or is she looking at, what is she looking at’, it does not really matter you just need it to register as eBay, also that eBay logo is really big, I know, but you need it to register and read quickly, so you sort of fudge how big it actually is, so that the reader can actually read it and understand that she is on eBay, for the purpose of this cartoon.
Okay, now I am doing his tie, and I am sort of erasing his hand out of the tie - I try to be as detailed as I can when I lay in the shading because then it, it sort of, you can either be detailed when you put in the shading, or you can worry about the detail when you are erasing, and I sort of go in-between there. You try to stay in the lines as much as you can, that’s, that would be a nice feature on Photoshop is stay in the lines, although most of my lines don’t connect, so that’s not really going to work, but it would be nice if it could sort of intuit that.
So for the Adobe people get to work on that or if someone knows, again if you know how to do that and I am just missing it, let me know, drop me an email. Okay, doing the desk here, we are getting towards the end of this one; this is a pretty quick shade. Here I am sort of doing that, doing his desk here, I will go ahead and do some erasing, sort of get that edge there so that it does not look too jagged or you know. I am erasing here on the top of the desk, still watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 the movie. This is all the intro they haven’t started, the movie is really good if you have not, this Island Earth, this is a great, it’s not an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 but it is the movie that they made, really fun.
Alright back to, back on task here. I did some shading and some erasing that I didn’t like, so I you know controlled, I think it is Ctrl+Shift+Z to go back a couple of steps, so I am taking another shot at that. I would prefer to do all of the shading like right on the actual paper with the actual art, but like I said you never know, I have had enough times where a client has come back and wanted something changed that I’ve sort of learned my lesson, so it is not as organic a look as I would like, but what you make up for in being able to go back and fix things, totally-totally makes this worth it.
So looks like we are just about done, so this is the final version of this and I think it was only two, three, four layers of shading and I think that looks pretty good, so I will add the caption later, save this for the client and send - oh and look the movie is starting - so I think that is my cue to leave, thank you for watching, make sure you visit Andertoons.com for lots of great cartoons and other fun stuff. And have a great day.
How To Draw A Cartoon Leprechaun – Tutorial
St. Patrick's Day is coming up fast, so I thought this week I'd show you how to draw a cartoon leprechaun in only twelve easy steps.
When you're done, feel free to email, tweet, pin, share, or glarble (I made that one up) a pic of your cartoon leprechaun and I'll post them here at the blog.
Good luck!
Not bad, eh? Just 12 little steps and you've got yourself a really nice leprechaun cartoon!
More tutorials are coming soon, but if you're still in the mood for drawing, feel free to check out my elephant tutorial here.
Editing A Cartoon Caption – Writing Cartoons Tutorial
With only a very short time to engage a reader, getting a cartoon's caption right is essential. So I made this short video on how I edit cartoon captions to get to the point. Enjoy:
If you're interested in seeing more about how I write cartoons, check out these blogs:
- How I Write Cartoons
- Writing Gags
- Brevity Is…
- 5 Common Cartoon Writing Mistakes to Avoid Like the Plague
- Wording
Video Transcription
Mark Anderson: Hello, I’m Mark Anderson from andertoons.com, and this is a short video in which I’m going to show you how I edit my gag cartoon captions from their long, wordy original form, down to what I hope is a short, punchy, final funny caption, so let’s get started.
Here is the cartoon we are going to be demonstrating this with. The idea here is that this gentleman is giving a presentation with a Venn diagram that’s so complicated, that he had to use a Spirograph toy to do the diagram, and here is the original caption that I came up with:
"Okay, listen up everyone. I was up all night working on this, plus I’ve had to use a Spirograph..."
So all of the ideas are there, you have the Spirograph, I like that use up all night working on this, because it’s difficult, he wants everyone to pay attention, it’s all there, but it’s much too long, and it’s very varied, but this is just where we are going to start and we are going to begin pruning it back little by little, because usually brevity is wit.
While some very long captions are very funny, generally shorter is better, we only have a couple seconds to set the scene, introduce the characters; get the joke across, so a shorter caption in general is better, so let’s start editing.
Here is take two on this:
"Listen I worked all night on this, and I had to use a Spirograph to boot..."
This is still too long, and it sort of feels, it’s supposed to be unfinished, the sentence is unfinished, but this, it feels awkward at the end, and I think it’s to boot. That’s a phrase I use a lot, but I just don’t think it works here, so, and let’s take another shot at this:
"I was up all night with this and I had to use a Spirograph, so listen up people..."
Generally, I like to put the, like the joke part of the joke, for lack of a better way to put it, at the end of the caption, but I moved it to the middle here, and I really wish I could give you a good reason why, it just felt better to me. I like the idea that he’s up all night, and he had to use a Spirograph, and listen up people. So it just seemed to work better to me, but this is still too long a caption, so let’s take another shot:
"This took me all night, and I had to use a Spirograph, so everyone listen up..."
It’s getting better, we started with 20 words, and we are down to, I’m looking at this real quick here, 16? So we are getting better, we are getting shorter, it’s the, it’s getting punchier, but still we can, we can do better:
"This took me all night, and the use of a Spirograph, so everyone listen up..."
I like this better, but you try different words, you try different phrases, the use of is awkward, so it’s a good try, but we are going to take another shot:
"This took me all night, and a Spirograph, so everyone listen up..."
This is definitely better; this is pretty close to what the final caption ends up being, but we could still do better here, so let’s take another shot at this:
"This took me all night, and a Spirograph, so focus, people..."
I like "focus people," "focus people" works better, me reading it out loud, than it actually does in print, I don’t know why that is, I think you bring something to it when you read it out loud, but it just doesn’t, if you take a second and read it, and feel free to pause as read, it doesn’t work as well in print as it does out loud, so let’s grab that:
"This took me all night, and a Spirograph, so everyone pay attention..."
It’s definitely getting better, we are really trimming this back, we are close, let’s take another shot:
"This took me all night, and a Spirograph, so pay attention..."
This is the final caption that I ended up with this on this cartoon, and I think it turned out pretty nice, you’ve got every thing you need in there, that he was up all night, that he had to use a Spirograph, because this was so complicated, that he wants people to pay attention to what he’s talking about, so I think we’ve trimmed it back as far as we’re, you know what actually when I was looking at this for this video, I could trim it back one more word, I’ll show you what that ended up being:
"This took all night, and a Spirograph, so pay attention..."
You know what, you lose the word "me" at the beginning of this, but what, this is really, this is really nerdy cartoonist. When you take out the word "me", I get the idea that maybe he had somebody else working on it, and that he actually didn’t do, and that takes away from the humor, wow you can really over think this stuff, and I probably have, my goodness, but let’s put the word "me" back in, and it just works better:
"This took me all night, and a Spirograph, so pay attention..."
That’s the final caption, I think we got it, trimmed it down from 20 words at the outset, to 11 words now, it’s short, it’s punchy, it’s got every thing you need, and how much fun are Spirographs, come on.
So that’s it for, how I edit my gag cartoon captions, I hope you enjoyed it. Feel free to visit andertoons.com and check out all of the other cartoons I have there, so thanks for watching.
Daily Cartoon
