Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Pen & Ink Caricature/portrait commission

I had the opportunity to create a very different, thoughtful gift for a recent client...she wanted to give a special professor something to thank him for his help in her receiving a PhD. She had me replicate the style of an old woodcut/pen & ink drawing of scholarly St. Jerome, only with a twist---now it's her advisor, surrounded by the mind-expanding technology of today...

...so his bookwheel (which he actually owns) and office are where you'll find him with his Kindle, Mac laptop, flash drive, Blackberry and desktop with the omnipresent Facebook page on display!
This commission was alot of fun for me. I used to do many pen & ink portraits of people, pets and houses before I became a caricaturist, but I hadn't done a digital pen and ink before. Because we did make some changes along the way, this was an absolute boon, not to mention, doing it digitally fit in well with the whole theme of this drawing---newfangled ways of doing things people have done for hundreds of years--learn, communicate, and DRAW!
My client had lots of good ideas and references for me. Her reaction to the finished piece was: I love it! Thanks so much. It turned out even better than I had originally imagined it.
She was to present a framed version to him today. :-)
I love my job!

2 comments:

  1. SwEEt Em!
    Really nice style!
    Has a "Mike Lukovich" political cartoon feel.
    Great tiger-is that drawn on wacom or scanned?
    Ummm......question......Is the tiger giving him a joint?

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  2. Thanks Pat, it was alot of fun to do. And, LOL, no-- it's a thorn in his paw. It's modeled after a famous painting of St. Jerome, a scholar and doctor of the early Catholic Church. He supposedly removed a thorn from a lion's paw, but in this cae the client asked for a tiger. All hand-drawn on my Wacom--each element was on its own layer so I could move the composition around, which I did end up doing. I'll have to google Mike Lukovich.

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