Kriota Willberg & Bob Sikoryak

Kriota Willberg is a dancer, massage therapist, and anatomical/medical cartoonist! Not only did she speak this afternoon as one of our visiting artists, but she came to life drawing class this morning. Sure, she knows everything about bones and muscles and where they attach on the skeleton.... but what was SO cool was that she actually drew them onto the model's body with washable markers!! It made drawing the figure so much easier. And more interesting.

There is no way for me to explain the talk she gave as it was a comedy routine in itself. She would show a very strange medical themed Gag cartoon on the screen and as she explained the medical terms (hilariously) colored notes would pop up on the gag with arrows. Luckily, she has a fantastic blog with examples of all her humor. I encourage you to take a look - you will never look at Pathology Cartoons in the same way. (Assuming you have ever looked at pathology cartoons...)

The point she stressed was that, as life changes, you find ways to combine your interests and emphasize your "experience" while also filling a void. i.e.: Medical cartoons. But believe it or not - it is a genre and has it's own websites, Graphic Medicine, and conferences, Comics and Medicine! Her point being - it's best to be at the top of your niche, even if it only includes five people.

Oh - and she also does needlework (as in embroidery, not phlebotomy) which she referred to as her "tissue sampler".

Our second artist was Bob Sikoryak who has WAY more than five people in his niche. He's done lots of New Yorker covers and is famous for his genius at parodying masterpieces of literature, using masterpieces of comic art. For example, Charlie Brown as the giant cockroach from Metamorphosis. Bazooka Joe plus Dante's Inferno = "Inferno Joe". He's had lots of strips in Drawn and Quarterly and Raw, and he's got a great book (Amazon link: Masterpiece Comics

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No classic work is safe! He's even cartooned the iTunes Terms and Conditions!!

On a less creative note...

here is how the last part of my Walt Kelly assignment turned out:

I had to letter the passages from A Tale of Two Cities using Walt Kelly's hand-lettering style. I used the style of PT Bear and the preacher rat(?) and the vulture, for the word balloons. That took forever since I don't know calligraphy and had to draw each letter. The rest was easier, but tedious and I finished it on my lap during the visiting artist lecture.