Readers seem to like it when I post my rough sketches, so here we go again, with my sketches for my last couple of cartoons.  The first one is the Obama Healthcare Caduceus.  I do the rough sketch in hard pencil on slick paper, so I'm not tempted to do details and render.

Then I trace over the sketch on drafting vellum, with a hard pencil that I scan to look like ink and save as a bitmap file for black and white printing.  The image below is what most readers see in the newspaper.

Then I add the color in Photoshop.  I use rather unsophisticated colors because newspaper printing is lousy, and if I use anything that isn't pastel and bright I get complaints from editors.

Here's the sketch for another health care cartoon.  Same thing here, hard pencil on slick paper.

I did the same thing with the pencil on vellum, but this time I just added a bit of gray tone to the drawing because I wasn't quite inspired to color this one.