Next stop: Birdland

The next caricaturing locale for Celestia and I was Oriole Park at Camden Yards, 

where we met up with Toonboy to ply our trade at a couple of games. Several O's employees remarked to us that they'd NEVER seen two ladies drawing there before (I draw occasionally for Rick, but for the most part, it's a male-dominated caricature concession. Heck, it's a male-dominated industry!

I bet none of Rick's other artists ever had an Orioles' orange-and-black pedicure like Celestia did!

I'll share some of my output first.

 Above: These ladies wanted me to pose for their photograph, so I snagged one with them as well.

Above: Your basic O's-themed caricature.

Some more couples:

Below: Gary "Toonboy" Smith has such a deft touch with the chalk and glove method:

 I really admire his cartooning skills. No one does the Oriole Bird like him! And fitting in three well-executed bodies, all doing different baseball-y things, is a feat.

Celestia's feat was of a different sort: putting four rather-inebriated men on one paper, and doing an awesome job of it:

Bravo! In contrast, these ladies were just dolled up, not inebriated but still fun:

Here's another Vine I did of Celestia doing a BW couple:

We had time to check out the game for a little bit...that's the Yankees behind us!

Go O's!

Happy 67th birthday, Freddie Mercury...

Freddie Mercury of Queen would have been 67 today. He is still missed by many, including me.

Two weeks ago, he was the subject for Traditional Caricature Art Contest on Facebook. The only rule is that artists may not use digital media.  It was the week I was drawing on the boardwalk, so on one early afternoon before it got busy, I did a little marker drawing with the implements shown. My entry got a healthy number of likes, but the one I was really enthralled with belonged to an artist from Spain, Joaquin Aldeguer. It' s a little gem. Most artists chose to depict Freddie in the mustache phase of his career (early to mid 80's), but Joaquin nailed his mid 70's glam image. 

In my humble opinion, even though Freddie seems like he should be easy to caricature, what with the crooked teeth/overbite, iconic mustache, aquiline nose, exotic eyes, and interesting head shape, he really is not. The main problem I saw was that so many entries went overboard on beefing him up, because he was such a compelling presence on stage. Very few entries (again, IMHO) caught his essence...that of a campy yet elegant, slender, charismatic powerhouse of a singer. (those links go to other drawings I found amazing :-)

I really like drawing him because his face is so intriguing. Here are a few of my not-always-caricature (and not-always-successful) attempts:

Above: This was the start of my ink sketch. you can still see the pencil lines.

Below: If you check out my Vines, there are several starring Freddie.

Using the Vine app...

If you have a smartphone or an iPad, chances are you've heard of the Vine app... 

it's a 6-second video-loop camera (overseen by Twitter) that you can use all in one fell swoop, or chopped up into stop-motion animation. Creatives of all types from comedians to cartoonists (often they are the SAME person, as you'll see when I give some recommendations at the end of this post) have discovered its uses. I've been using it mainly for caricature reactions. 

Here's a link to Seenive, a web viewer for Vines---click to see all my Vines.

When I have some free time, though, one of my favorite things to do is make little rock-star homages:

When you download the app, you can see who follows who, but here are links to the outstanding Vines of two of my friends: Marlo Meekins and Celestia Ward.