Tuesday, January 13, 2009

How to Draw George Bush

Political Cartoonist Daryl Cagle tells how he draws George Bush and he has posted some funny Bush cartoons:
Around the world, cartoonists almost always draw President Bush as a cowboy. Outside America, a Texas cowboy is seen as: uneducated, ill mannered, a “trigger-happy marshal” or outlaw who is prone to violence. Cowboy depictions of the president by worldwide cartoonists are meant to be insults, but Americans see cowboys differently. In the USA, cowboys are noble, independent souls, living a romantic lifestyle by taming the wilderness and taking matters into their own hands whenever they see a wrong that needs to be righted. We are a nation of wanna-be cowboys.
The image of President Bush evolves with each cartoonist’s personal perspective. Back in 2000, Bush started out as most political cartoon characters start out, as a caricature of a real person, meant to be recognizable from a photograph. The cartoonists soon stopped looking at photographs and started doing drawings of drawings, then drawings of drawings of drawings, so that the George W. Bush drawings morphed into strangely deformed characters that looked nothing like the real man, but are instantly recognizable because we’ve come to know the drawings as a symbol of the man. It is surprising that each cartoonist’s drawings of the president look entirely different, but each is easily recognizable as representing the same character.
Read and see more.