Harvard Magazine: "Truer Than Reality: Kevin Kallaugher On the Art of Editorial Cartooning"

Kevin "Kal" Kallaugher is the subject of a Harvard Magazine profile. He talks about his early years of struggle:

"They asked him to caricature Henry Rosovsky, then-dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. But they didn’t have any photographs for reference. 'Can you draw him from memory?' he remembers them asking. 'Oh, my God. I can’t draw my own father from memory, much less Dean Rosovsky!'

"Nevertheless, Kallaugher summoned a mental image: big forehead, 'Coke-bottle-thick glasses,' and a mole beneath his lip. 'And [the editor] goes, ‘Yeah, that’s Dean Rosovsky! That’s great!' So, there was another 50 bucks.” 

He also talks process:

"Kallaugher’s ideas emerge from a process he calls his 'production pipeline.' He scans the news and talks with editors and friends, pondering how he feels, what observations he can make, and whether a cartoon is the best medium for an idea. This is followed by frenetic sketching—he scrawls hieroglyphic thumbnails across the page—and more inner dialogues. After getting editors’ feedback on his rough sketches, the heavy-duty artistry begins. It’s a confluence of new and old technology. For heavy cross-hatching, labor-intensive handwork, Kallaugher keeps a repository of pen nibs, some more than a century old and purchased years ago at Philip Poole’s His Nibs pen shop in London. For the final alterations, he uses Photoshop."

Go read!