This was my favorite cartoon of 2007 for many reasons.

– What I like about the toon is 5-fold:

– It got a response out of that wingnut Paul Scholten (who actually thinks the Devil had something to do with #6 getting shot down)

– Some people still understood it, even though they didn’t know anything about the Mona Lisa discovery that she was pregnant. This really surprised me, since the news was out for a week once this printed.

– I took a current event and applied it too something happening in our state, and even if people didn’t know about the event they still understood.

– I liked that the cartoon didn’t say anything about being pro-choice or pro-life. Some people said I was sitting on the fence, on the contrary, the cartoon is clearly about government interference in our lives, it is not about abortion.

– I used centuries old art and modernized it. This is the cool ‘art’ thing about this toon. I downloaded about 5 different photos of Mona and 20 different photo’s of Leonardo. I used the best photo’s I could find to manipulate. The Mona one was so good and high enough resolution it was easy to trace. I use a 3-step process that involves using 3 different software programs and several steps. I chuckle when people say ‘oh, you did that in Photoshop’. Yes Photoshop is very helpful, but my completed artwork is always ‘vector’. Sorry I cannot divulge my techniques. That’s right, even though it is computer drawn, it takes more then a mouse click to create the cartoons. The hard part was Leonardo, I had to piece together several different layers of his famous self-portrait in order to get the contrast I wanted. I almost didn’t complete this toon because of the bad Leo images.

Maybe in 2007 I’ll get my crayons out and create an actual drawling, but doubtful, I retain that talent for my real ‘art’.

In the words of a famous cartoon character:

‘Yabba, dabba, doo!’