[dc]I[/dc] wrote recently about my first cartoon commission, The Terror of Mechaplatypus, and now I am adding another commission piece to portfolio.
This commission came from a client, Meghan, in Portland¹, who wanted a portrait of her cat, Milhouse, as a math professor. It would be a wedding gift for her fiancé, who “is a serious math guy.” Meghan wanted math jokes on a chalkboard behind the cat, and the piece painted in watercolor.
Challenge accepted.
Meghan provided photos of her cat, Milhouse, and let me go wildwhen it came to the look of the piece and the jokes.
Commission Pencils
Not being a math person myself, I researched visual math gags for a bit. I knew I wanted to work in a reference to the math problem in the opening scene of the film Rushmore, at the very least.
Here are the pencils.
The good thing about math being around for at least, uh, a couple hundred years, is there are plenty of jokes. My research did not disappoint, and I came up with a couple of jokes on my own.
Commission Inks
Next came the inks, with my trusty Micron pens (and whatever else I had handy²).
You probably can’t tell by the photo, but the cartoon is 5”x7” in size. A bit bigger than my 2.5” x 3.5” sketch cards—always good to force myself to try something different.