Facebook avatars!

It's always fun to see new fans join my Caricatures by Emily page on Facebook. Often, they are people I have recently drawn at a gig. Yesterday, I checked out some new additions and one of them was the lady on the top left, whom I drew at one of the school events I did last week. . She and three other fans are currently using my live caricatures of them as their avatars!

And these are just the ones I know of... At some events, when I represent party planners or caricature artist agencies, I do not give out my own contact information, so the people I draw don't know about my personal website or FB page. I still hear lots of them saying "I'm gonna put this on my Facebook" :-)

Wedding reception!

Last night, I was honored to be a part of a very happy couple's wedding reception! They got married last week in Jamaica and yesterday was their celebration with family and friends. We watched their wedding video before the festivities got started...

The bride and groom's beach theme carried over everywhere...




My easel was set up next to a photographer who took photos of each person with their caricature, for the bride and groom to have as part of their wedding album!

I was able to take some of my own photos as well at this event, since the very capable DJ kept people busy with conga lines and games; I never had a huge line at any one time. But I was still able to get the majority of people drawn! :-)






Below, I even got to draw the DJ and photographers!

I drew the bride and groom at the very end (four hours later!) and forgot to get their photo, but they know I appreciate their having me! Thanks again, Valerie and Albert, and congratulations!

School "prep rally" event...part 2

This afternoon I travelled to the land of tall buildings to draw more kids who were prepping for standardized tests:

This one had a larger number of students than yesterday, so I was cranking them out as fast as I could. Reactions were big smiles from both kids and parents!

It was too busy to take photos, but I did get these two little munchkins toward the end. :-)

School "prep rally" event...

This afternoon, a school with some lucky students decided to "fill in" some fun with standardized-test preparation! I was invited to caricature the kids as they took short breaks or ate lunch. I had a blast, too. Here are a few of them!


Tomorrow, I'm doing it again for more students. :-)
Hooray for weekday gigs!

Another Artcast/contest tonight...

Stephen Silver's Artcast tonight on Ustream will be another informative talk and critique of character designs submitted this past week. This time it was 'make a character design of one of your parents'. So I did a no-reference digital sketch of my late dad, back when he was rotund and lottery-ticket-slap-happy (well, he remained that til he passed).
It's not the best likeness of him, but the essence is there.

Class reunion photos... of caricaturist at work

The hard-working chairperson of our reunion, Connie Hopkins, even found time to take these two great photos of me in action. See how much fun it is to get a caricature?? ;-D

Class Reunion!

Last night, I attended (and drew at) a long-awaited class reunion...my own! It was a long time coming, in that we've never had a reunion for my all-girls high school, because it was closed after our junior year. We then were all dispersed to other high schools. So, twenty-eight years later, one of us, Connie Hopkins, decided that with a little help from Facebook and some determination, we were finally going to have our night.
Of course, I had to do a caricature of the teenage version of Connie:

And here she is with it:

I spent an hour-plus drawing, and wasn't my regular speedy self-- because I just had to chat with everyone I drew. And the other anomaly was that, at this 'gig' I allowed myself a few drinks! :-o


We had a huge poster with all of us on display:


Can you spot me?
In the reunion booklet, there was a list of all the Class Superlatives from way back: guess I'm still the same old me (albeit with different hair!). I got voted "Most Artistic" !
We had about 35% of our class present. Pretty good, huh? Thanks, ladies!

Winner of my Facebook fanpage contest..

Some time ago, I drew a name out of all my Facebook fans and the winner was Linda Donev of Florida. She opted to have me draw her teenage son, and here he is!

I'm thinking about having another contest, but don't know exactly how I want to do it. Any suggestions?

WIP #4

More loved ones are being added, slowly, to my grandson's nursery painting!

The cats represent myself and my fiance; they're a type of African wildcat called a serval. I thought they were so cute, as we both love cats--and tigers or leopards, etc, just seemed too threatening. The little orange monkey is for the baby's red-headed older brother on his dad's side...I'll add more grandparents, etc. in there soon!

WIP #1
WIP #2
WIP #3

Doodled her right into a character design....

One of the bystanders that I drew at this past weekend's hockey tournament doesn't know it, but she's been immortalized as a character design on the internet now!

Only the top left image was done from the subject, and it started out as just a quick gesture drawing. The next two pencil sketches were from memory. Then I took a light box and redrew them below, colored them with Prismacolor and Chartpak markers, scanned them, then inked and finished them in Photoshop. Why do all this? When I logged onto Facebook yesterday, I saw that noted character designer Stephen Silver was holdng a contest on www.sketchoholic.com, with the winner to receive a critique from him on their work during his weekly Ustream show. I'd like a shot at that! So this is my entry...one of 47. Those aren't bad odds!
Steve also has a Facebook group, Stephen Silver-Passion for Life,where he talks about artistic motivation and passion. And inspires lots of people, I'm sure, because I'm one of them!

Here's a link to the contest page, if you'd like to vote you'd have to join Sketchoholic, but it looks like an interesting prospect if you're an artist. Voting will finish right before Steve's show tomorrow night (3-16-10) at 10:30 pm EST.

Updat 3-16-10 Well, I didn't win, but I learned alot from watching Stephen's Ar cast and hearing him critique the winner's sketch. Next week's assignment is to do a character design of our dads! That'll be fun!

Doodling the downtime away...

Before I got busy at the hockey tournament, I did some people-watching...and doodling. These unaware subjects stood still long enough for me to get a likeness...and I completed the shading at odd moments during the event.

8 1/2 x 11, HB pencil.

Drawing at an ice hockey tournament...

Yesterday, I donned my UnderArmour and went to caricature ice hockey-playing kids. Since the Olympics, it seems people are more enthusiastically aware of this sport. I was just glad not to have to draw any baseballs! (although that will come soon enough!)

Drew the above teens first, then they took off to watch a game and left Dad to it!

Hockey divas galore! :-D


I even drew kids who were on the rink at the time, from their photos! These two girls' mom told me that their dad is serving in Iraq, so we customized it just for him!

And of course, at any sporting event, siblings get dragged along to be...spectators. These two swim-teammates wanted to be anywhere but an ice rink!

WIP #3

My third work session on the painting yielded a Giraffe for Uncle George and a Meercat for Aunt Madeline.
The 'client' (my grandson Nekoda) is pictured below! :-)

I'm figuring that after the composition gets filled in with other family members, I'll go back and make them more personalized-- with such things as eye color and other little idiosyncracies (but they won't be true caricatures). Then it will be time for lots of exotic plants. So far it's getting rave reviews from the 'people' it's depicting! :-)

I usually listen to music while painting, but today I traded in the Beatles, Queen and Led Zeppelin for ENYA!!!!!

Acrylic WIP, stage 2

Spent some time on it this morning. Mixing colors with paint rather than pencils or pastels has always been a struggle for me, and I also hate that expensive acrylic paint gets wasted! One tube that I opened came streaming out when I only wanted a little, for the Mommy Monkey's lips. So I decided that big blob of alizarin crimson would make some nice foliage...
I am definitely having fun applying said paint once I get the right color.

The box lid holds all the tubes I have to throw out..some of them are decades old!

Acrylic work-in-progress...

I haven't brushed with anything other than digital paint in a very. very long while. Why am I breaking out the old acrylics (some of which have dried up completely) and attempting the biggest canvas I have done since high school?
It's because my new grandson needs something large and colorful to hang next to his crib!!

He has a monkey-themed nursery, so I am going to just develop the composition as it comes. My first idea was a jungle scene with monkey caricatures of everyone in our family...but we'll see if that pans out. Other animals will definitely make an appearance. I decided to share each session's progress here on the blog-- I did the underpainting (below) the other day, and this (above) is as far as I got this afternoon in a couple of hours. The canvas is 24 x 36.
It will be very interesting to see if what I have learned from digital painting carries over to the real-life equivalent!

80th birthday party sign-in!

These pictures are from the birthday party in Florida where my caricature was the sign-in!
I like how different pen colors were used for the signatures. Thanks again, Brenda, for the photos!

An 80th birthday digital commission...

This gentleman from Palm Beach, Florida will be celebrating his 80th birthday today with his family...and his niece ordered this caricature for his party!

The background is actually a photo of his 'back yard' on the Intracoastal waterway. I reworked it a bit and removed the couple that was standing on the dock to give Arthur his place in the sun! :-)
Hopefully, I will get some client photos from the party, of how the caricature is displayed. Thank you, Brenda! :-)

Happy birthday, Shemp!

A quick digital for the ISCA celebrity birthday thread...done on my new monitor! My friend Rick helped me (Thanks, Rick! :-) get it working smoothly, so that now, my Macbook Pro runs Photoshop and only shows my reference material (this particular piece is done from several photos of Mr. Horowitz, aka Shemp)
...and my 22" monitor displays---much better, I might add---the actual painting/drawing that I am working on. Before now, I did everything on my 15" laptop screen.

Shemp's actual birthday is in dispute...some sources say today, some say March 17th, so who knows? He and the other three original Stooges are the only ones there are, to me!