Tuesday at the Fair

Some of yesterday's output:



This is actually Celestia's lunch, she was braver than I and tried this "fried salad" which was surprisingly pretty good ( I had a bite or two!)

Speaking of Celestia, she got to draw this adorable cowboy-hatted baby:



This year's life-size butter sculpture is of football players. Would love to see the armature under this one....and yes, it's kept in a refrigerated display case.

Sometimes we see people in the vicinity who have no intention of getting a caricature...and we wish they would.

State Fair of TX, Day 4

I had a surprisingly eventful Monday!

Here are the friends I made at last year's fair, back for this year's version of a family caricature. The really funny thing about their showing up on this particular Monday, is that JB and I had been considering my taking off for the evening and going out to dinner at their restaurant! Luckily, they'd stopped by the booth and said, "We'll be back later for our caricature." So when JB called and said, "Let's go to Suzushi," I said, "We can't, our sushi chef is HERE at the fair!!"
And when I saw that they'd won that giant pig (how they got it home in a car or even through a door is beyond me) I knew it would be the ENTIRE background of their caricature! :-) And their little girl was fast asleep in her stroller, so I drew her from an awesome photo on her daddy's Iphone.

Some father-daughter caricatures...

The girl in the couple on the left had such vivid blue contacts that I convinced them to get a color caricature instead of a BW one!
On the left, this young lady's aunt told us her neice's whole life story while I was drawing her, and also told all within earshot everything we caricaturists say about why caricatures make a fantastic souvenir! I was afraid we'd have to start paying her!

I decided to record some of the interesting fair foods I consume. And no, that will not include the fried beer they have this year.
This is a Greek dolma (grape-leaf-wrapped meat and rice--mmm) with a chocolate-covered strawberry chaser.

Here's a creepy Uncle Sam making a parade appearance...and some other Fair sights:



Our intrepid airbrush-caricature crew, plus my groupie. :-)

State Fair of TX, Day 3

I didn't laze on this particular Sunday afternoon! The fair was packed with caricature fans today.

This family has had their kids' caricatures done in previous years by both Paul and Vlad, and this year they got a family version from me, and the two kids done separately by Celestia (that' s why big sis isn't in my photo, she was busy posing elsewhere :-).

More couple caricatures!

Every year the Fair has a "Glue a Shoe" contest. Although it didn't win the big prize, this is my favorite entry:

Deep in the heart of Texans...

...lies love for their State Fair---and caricatures!

Well, I've moseyed on down to Dallas, Texas to do airbrush caricatures once again. I'm with the same crew as always, Celestia, Vlad and our fearless leader, Paul--without all of whom, I would not know how to use an airbrush...

My other half, JB, is here for a few days too!

Here are my comrades at work on the first day of twenty-four:



A wonderful array of faces presented themselves to me on the first day, too!

The family above became my very first customers of the fair. They have a collection of black and white caricatures of themselves---Celestia drew them last year.

Some twosomes!

Some cool requests:
"Draw me with great big muscles."
"Draw my shades!" (His dad asked what the reflections were in his sunglasses--I said, it's me, the caricaturist!)
"Make sure you put in the 'dry heat' shirt." I put in a heated background too!;-)

On the second day, there was a college football game held in the Cotton Bowl, which is situated smack-dab in the middle of the fairgrounds. I was asked to come up to the broadcast booth to draw the ESPN2 announcers:






Saturday brought its share of fun faces to do as well:





JB kept me fortified with funnel cake topped with caramel and whipped cream... I do have a love/hate relationship with fair food ;-)

College carnival

Many a dorm will soon be adorned with my work! Today's occasion was a small-town college's little outdoor carnival. I worked near a henna artist and many students did both that and a caricature.

Fit five girls on this one! And one was from Bangkok, Thailand and knew of the park my son where my son teaches yoga.
Definitely drew more girls than boys today...

The "A Team"

Baltimore had its finest caricaturists on duty on Saturday!

Yes, I'm including Celestia and myself in that self-flattering title. We came to draw Yankee fans!

Celestia was asked to draw a lady with her two favorite Yankees and was provided decent size photos to work from:

Jerry was asked to draw this rather-inebriated fan with Mickey Mantle...

...from a baseball card with a miniscule picture. However, he pulled it off!

This is some of my output from the evening...ALL Yankee fans:

including another BW triple. These are hard for me compositionally, because I want each person to be shown adequately. But I think I pulled it off. :-)

Caricaturama 3000-this week it was Queen Elizabeth II

It's digital--- I pen-and-inked it, then used a watercolor brush for the color. Some amazing entries, as usual...

Just Google "Queen Elizabeth" and "lizard" if you don't get it. ;-)

Museums, murals, and friends...

My friend and artistic cohort, Celestia, has arrived from the distant non-existent shores of Las Vegas for a visit. We have had a lot of fun wandering around the Mid-Atlantic region! We did the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. the other day, and I finally got to see what I wanted to see---- instead of what middle-school field-trip parent-chaperone agendas wanted me to see (I won't miss the Air and Space Museum if I never set foot in it again!)
Here are some highlights of what my now eyeglasses-less eyes have had the pleasure of seeing lately!

I've always been riveted by self-portraiture, so seeing this Rembrandt was an amazing experience for me.

This is the ONLY Da Vinci in the Western hemisphere. Seeing this lovely piece close up made me very aware of the profound influence this artist has had on the entire world...
Below are two paintings by one of my favorites, Mary Cassatt.


We also made time to see the Rockwell exhibition in the Museum of American Art. Whether or not it's cool to like Rockwell (and I do) the man was a master of images, brushwork and storytelling. Unlike the other museums, photography was not permitted. I was totally taken with a large charcoal study Rockwell did for a 1947 Saturday Evening Post cover "Going and Coming". It depicts a 1940's family on its way to and from vacation, and Rockwell caught every nuance of the differences in expressions of the same subjects in different circumstances.

During our southerly jaunt, Celestia was the art director/head artiste on this cute nursery mural that we painted for her new nephew: