Charles Apple

Duoshade — long a valued friend to brush-using board cartoonists, especially those working in black-and-white — is being discontinued.

Alan Gardner of the Daily Cartoonist blog reports:

According to Hayley Prendergast, President of Grafix, Consumer Products, the production of the paper has grown more difficult and costly to produce while demand as declined over the years.

What’s Duoshade? Admittedly, it’s something you don’t see much of anymore.

Here’s a slice of art by famed illustrator Jack Davis of Mad Magazine:

See the wonderfully sketchy shading and background? That’s Duoshade:

See this cartooney cowboy by illustrator Britt Spencer?

That’s Duoshade:

It gives an artist a way of achieving fine, crosshatched shading. But very, very quickly and easily. I used this stuff for a few years back in the 1980s and it brought a real professionalism to my work.

Here’s how it works…

You purchase Duoshade board — about the same weight as standard cold-press bristol board — that has invisible diagonal lines in each direction embedded in it. You also get two bottles of chemical developer:

And, according to Duoshade’s own advertisement:

The ad says a “pen or brush,” but I think just about everyone used a brush. You could do some pretty funky things with it…

…that translated nicely when the art was reduced for publication:

Back in the day, this stuff was used by a lot of editorial cartoonists — which is how I got ahold of it. One of the few current guys still using Duoshade is longtime Los Angeles Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez, now with Investor’s Business Daily:

But it pops up in other places, as well. For example, you might just be old enough to remember the original appearance of these li’l guys:

Yeah, the original Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were illustrated on Duoshade.

The Jack Davis sample is from Mark Evanier’s blog. The turtle illo was found on Peter Laird’s blog. The Duoshade ad was found at Mike Lynch’s blog. Britt Spencer walks us through how Duoshade worked here.

If you want to order some, you’d better act fast. Find Grafix’ Duoshade web page here.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 6:31 am and is filed under Comic books, Editorial cartooning, Illustration, Industry woes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.