Cartoonist

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A cartoonist at work. Pictured is a Sunday color page of the comic strip Mark Trail.

A cartoonist is an artist who specializes in drawing cartoons. The term can also be applied to those who produce comic books, anime, manga, editorial cartoons, as well as comic strip creators and those working in animation. Those artists whose work is said to have a "cartoony" style are also called cartoonists.

A cartoonist traditionally sketches the picture out roughly in pencil first, before going over the sketches in black ink, using either brushes or metal nibbed pens. Cartoonists whose work is intended for online publication increasingly work in digital media.

Large comic book publishers (such as Marvel or DC) utilize teams of cartoonists to produce the art (typically one doing the pencil work and another doing the inking, with the coloring added digitally by colorists). When a consistent artistic style is wanted among different cartoonists (such as Archie Comics), character model sheets may be used as reference.

Traditional animation houses employ specialized cartoonists, called "inbetweeners", to draw the motions connecting the broad movements of a character. This process is often called "tweening".