CARTOON

The word cartoon has various meanings, based on several very different forms of visual art and illustration. The term has evolved over time. The original meaning was in fine art, and there cartoon meant a preparatory drawing for a piece of art such as a painting or tapestry. The somewhat more modern meaning was that of humorous illustrations in magazines and newspapers.

Even more recently there are now several contemporary meanings, including creative visual work for print media, for electronic media, and even animated films and animated digital media. When the word cartoon is applied to print media, it most often refers to a humorous single-panel drawing or gag cartoon, most of which have captions and do not use speech balloons. The word cartoon is not often used to refer to a comic strip.

The artists who draw cartoons are known as cartoonists. A cartoon (from the Italian "cartone" and Dutch word "karton", meaning strong, heavy paper or pasteboard) is a full-size drawing made on sturdy paper as a study or modello for a painting, stained glass, or tapestry. Cartoons were typically used in the production of frescoes, to accurately link the component parts of the composition when painted on damp plaster over a series of days (giornate).

Such cartoons often have pinpricks along the outlines of the design; a bag of soot was then patted or "pounced" over the cartoon, held against the wall to leave black dots on the plaster ("pouncing"). Cartoons by painters, such as the Raphael Cartoons in London and examples by Leonardo da Vinci, are highly prized in their own right. Tapestry cartoons, usually coloured, were followed by eye by the weavers on the loom.