Keep It Steady: Week 11 Challenge

Choose one of this week's constraints:

• Thematic/Narrative: Myth
• Visual: Draw each panel with a single unbroken line
• Structural/OuBaPian: Design a comic to be read on a tablet screen

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 10 Challenge

Choose one of this week's constraints:

• Thematic/Narrative: Bad Habit
  
• Visual: Ink wash
• Structural/OuBaPian: Every panel has a sound effect, but no dialogue

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 8 Challenge

We apologize for last week's lack of challenges. Major General Arroyo and the Vice-President were preparing for coming initiative.

Choose one of this week's constraints:

• Thematic/Narrative: Mystery
• Visual: Limited Palette - Use only three colors or three shades of grey
• Structural/OuBaPian: Beautiful Inlaw - You can only use the letters in your name for your comic's text

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 6 Challenge

Choose one of this week's constraints:

• Thematic/Narrative: Set your story in a specific real-world or fictional city
• Visual: Plastic Perspective - Draw each panel from the same vantage point
• Structural/OuBaPian: Cylinder - Draw a comic in which the reader can begin with any panel, read to the end, and come back around to where she started without any lapse into incoherence

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 5 Challenge

Choose one of this week's constraints:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Jungle"
• Visual: 50% ink, 50% color distribution
• Structural/OuBaPian: Larding - Begin by drawing two panels. Draw another panel between this pair, and proceed to draw a new panel between each pair. Continue this process until you feel the comic is complete. (We will only see your finished comic.)

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 4 Challenges

Choose one of this week's constraints:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Symphony"
• Visual: Use stippling
• Structural/OuBaPoian: Choose a song; you may only use the words in the song's lyrics for your comic's dialogue. They do not need to be in the same order as in the song.

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 3 Challenges

The options for this week's constraint are:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Revolution"
• Visual: Use parallel hatching for midtones
• Structural/OuBaPoian: Word Ladder - Write a word ladder involving three or four-letter words, and draw a comic with as many panels as there are steps in the ladder. Each panel must involve its corresponding word in some form.

 For more information on our challenges and submitting your work, check under the cut!

Keep It Steady: Week 1 Challenger Round-Up

Last week's constraints were:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Summer"
• Visual: Only use color pencils
• Structural/OuBaPoian: Beautiful Outlaw - You cannot use any of the letters in your name in your comic's text

Both of our participants decided to use multiple constraints.

This submission by Laura Knetzger, who recently graduated, features all the constraints in an unconventional comics form.

Greg Maggi's submission takes us to a red and blue dreamscape. This week's thematic constraint is "Ocean," so I wonder how he will treat the subject differently if he chooses that challenge. Can you make a comic about the ocean without showing it?

Did you draw a comic under last week's constraints? Click here for submission instructions.

This week's constraints are:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Ocean"
• Visual: You cannot draw with you dominant hand
• Structural/OuBaPoian: Palindrome - Your comic can be read normally and in reverse

Check this week's challenge announcement for more details and submission instructions. Keep it steady!

Keep It Steady: Week 2 Challenges

Constraints help give artists direction in a world of infinite possibility, as well as encourage them to tackle subjects and techniques they have trouble with. Each week, Cartoon Allies will offer three constraints to choose from and apply to your work, whether as the basis of a one-page comic or to improve a long-form work. These will take the form of a thematic/narrative constraint, a visual constraint, and an OuBaPoian constraint.

Two of the tenants of the Keep It Steady Initiative are self-improvement and consistently making comics. Starting this week, we will be offering weekly prompts to motivate and challenge you as a cartoonist. We encourage you to choose one of the three constraints to make a one-page comic this week, but feel free to apply these constraints to a longer project; this could help you overcome a problem you're facing by viewing it from a new vantage point. To learn more about the benefits of working with constraints, check out this Wired article.

This week's challenges are:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Ocean"
• Visual: You cannot draw with you dominant hand
• Structural/OuBaPoian: Palindrome - Your comic can be read normally and in reverse

Next week we will feature any comics completed under these constraints on the Cartoon Allies website and tumblog. There are multiple options for submitting comics:

• Email it to cartoonallies@gmail.com with the subject line "Week 1 Challenge - [Name]"
• Post it on the Keep It Steady Initiative Facebook group
• Submit it to the Cartoon Allies Tumblog

Keep It Steady: Week 1 Challenges

Constraints help give artists direction in a world of infinite possibility, as well as encourage them to tackle subjects and techniques they have trouble with. Each week, Cartoon Allies will offer three constraints to choose from and apply to your work, whether as the basis of a one-page comic or to improve a long-form work. These will take the form of a thematic/narrative constraint, a visual constraint, and an OuBaPoian constraint.


Two of the tenants of the Keep It Steady Initiative are self-improvement and consistently making comics. Starting this week, we will be offering weekly prompts to motivate and challenge you as a cartoonist. We encourage you to choose one of the three constraints to make a one-page comic this week, but feel free to apply these constraints to a longer project; this could help you overcome a problem you're facing by viewing it from a new vantage point. To learn more about the benefits of working with constraints, check out this Wired article.

This week's challenges are:

• Thematic/Narrative: "Summer"
• Visual: Only use color pencils
• Structural/OuBaPoian: Beautiful Outlaw - You cannot use any of the letters in your name in your comic's text

Next week we will feature any comics completed under these constraints on the Cartoon Allies website and tumblog. There are multiple options for submitting comics:

• Email it to cartoonallies@gmail.com with the subject line "Week 1 Challenge - [Name]"
• Post it on the Keep It Steady Initiative Facebook group
• Submit it to the Cartoon Allies Tumblog
• Post it on Tumblr with the tag "ca challenge"

Thesis Post-Mortem Pt. I: Process & Expectations

"Man Made Monsters" BFA Illustration & Cartooning Thesis Exhibition

Thesis year was a major turning point in my cartooning career. This was not due to all the hype built around the project or its accompanying thesis show. Instead, I owe part of my success to the framework of the project, one of the many elements which came together to pull me out of the failures and bad habits of my sophomore year.

In this inaugural weekly series for the Keep It Steady Initiative, I’m going to break down my journey to a better work ethic into advice which I hope will be useful to other students and cartoonists tackling their own thesis comics or any long-term work. This week’s post focuses on process and expectations, with a section dedicated to those who treat their work too preciously.

Announcing the CA Tumblog & Keep It Steady Steady Initiative

We'd like to thank you for helping us make this past year's events such a success. Now that another school year is well behind us, it's time that we jumped right into Cartoon Allies' new summer operations.

First off, Cartoon Allies has launched a tumblog for student promotion. The goal of the CA Tumblog is to promote the work of young School of Visual Arts cartoonists, past and present, to a broad online audience. If you're an SVA student or alum interested in sharing your art on Tumblr or already running your own blog, we invite you to submit your work. Please follow us and help support your peers. In our first weekend, we have already been promoted by SPX, generating a lot of attention from outside the school.

Today we are launching a new program, the Keep It Steady Initiative. The goal of this program it to help keep students and alumni productive over the summer and motivate young cartoonists to maintain short and long-term goals. Based on the tenants of Accountability, Constraint, Critique, and Support, we plan to help you in a variety of ways, including...

• ...email reminders about approaching deadlines.
• ...weekly comics prompts for tackling new ideas and working outside your comfort zone.
• ...online group critique sessions.
• ...new content on the Cartoon Allies blog for sharing knowledge and resources and promoting student work.
• ...monthly Spotlight articles on the blog, which share your accomplishments with the world.

All parts of the Initiative are optional. Find out how to register here, and then join the Initiative's Facebook group to keep in touch with other participants. This is our first major summer program, so please participate and give us feedback.

In other news, SVA alumni have put together the Hermit Club for organizing monthly meetings in NYC and sharing work. They are accepting current students and grads.

Let's work together to make this summer the most productive yet and bring attention to our talented student body. Stay strong, Allies!