State Fair of Texas 2012... we drew flaming Big Tex in the backgrounds of our caricatures

This year's State Fair of Texas airbrush caricature booth was busy enough that I was too tired at night to blog!  I will have some caricatures and stories up soon, have to sort through my tons of photos.

The climax of the fair's final weekend was the unintentional burning of Big Tex, beloved fair icon, due to an electrical short in his right boot. Flames tore right up him and out his head like the 52-foot chimney he was...
Massive crowds came the next day to rubber neck and/or pay tribute. ;-)

Who knew that my annual photo with cohort Celestia Ward would be the our last with the sixty-year-old version of the big cowboy? Of course, fair officials say he'll be back bigger and better next year...I hope they don't improve him too much. Just make him not flammable!

Here's what we found when we hotfooted it (!) from our booth to see what was left of him...

 Instead of looking like Ronald Reagan, he now resembled Herman Munster!

Of course, we ended up incorporating his fiery end into our caricatures. ;-) Hey, it was OF THE MOMENT. We won't ever be drawing that again!

Our past co-worker Vlad had moved on to greener pastures, so our booth had two newbies to the fair lifestyle (but oldies to caricature) who split up the 3 1/2 weeks between them. First was gregarious Doug Citizen, whom I'd met briefly before in Las Vegas (he runs a retail caricature stand at Planet Hollywood and employs both Celestia and her husband, the famed Sundini). The other was Sundini himself. Both of them wowed us with differing approaches to airbrush caricature and I learned alot. And laughed alot too. ;-) 

Celestia, Paul, myself and Doug. Photo by one of my customers (I just handed him my camera and asked for a few "foursome" shots!)

Same deal here. Myself, Celestia, Paul and Sundini. 

Now that I am home and partially recovered from my 24 day stint, which Celestia kindly figured out is equivalent to "working double full-time",  I need to catch up on emails, calls, commissions, do a few gigs and finish my studio piece for the upcoming ISCA convention. Aaaagh!---but I love my job!