A party for a 3rd-birthday cutie...

…who loves Doc McStuffins---an animated little girl who wants to be a doctor so she practices on her stuffed animals. 

A three-year-old's birthday celebration means--- drawing a lot of little kids! The party was held in a children's gymnasium, so as soon as I drew them, they ran back to the fun while I finished shading.

There were a few kids who hung around to see the result:

He went zany on me when I took the photo! :-O

Thank you for having me, that was my last caricature gig of 2013. Happy New Year!!!!

A small company holiday party...

The day before Xmas Eve, I drew at a small, friendly company party. There were some rather adorable kids there…lots of cute red outfits.

Below: The photographer caught me in mid-artstick-stroke…pressing it down hard!! I hope that's not my customary face when I'm working----but the expressions on my audience make my day. 

Below, again: Can you spot who these two are in the above photo?

Yes, I drew some adults too!

This was the last holiday party for 2013….thank you, Peter, for the wonderful photos! :-)

Winter Solstice party!

Last Saturday was the shortest day of the year, and hence the Winter Solstice. My Other Half was able to go to a gig with me, celebrating just that, and enjoy the party while I drew…

…but he won't be in any of the photos because he was taking them. ;-) The party was held by a local group of Secular Humanists in a popular restaurant that my Other Half and I have been to many times. Everyone enjoyed a buffet dinner, raffles, some very funny jugglers... and my caricatures. 

Here's a few moments of the antics of the Juggling Hoffmans…Python fans will appreciate this:

Happy Solstice! 

Merry Xmas to everyone!

Have a wonderful holiday, no matter which one you celebrate! Thank you for reading my blog and enjoying my work all year. :-)

Holiday party in a casino atmosphere!

A real casino, too, not just the ubiquitous casino theme like I'm used to, at post-proms:

Yes, casinos are everywhere now. When I walked in, it might as well have been Atlantic City or Vegas. The party was being held in the in-house Chickie-and-Pete's restaurant (a far cry from the one I drew next to during my stint on the OCNJ boardwalk!) 

The get-together was for a company of IT techs so I drew monitors with their logo on all the drawings.

Lot of laughter ensued as colleagues watched each other be drawn. In between caricatures, I got a glance at a pretty momentous Flyers game! The TV was THISCLOSE to my easel!

Thanks once to again to Gigmasters for hooking me up with this delightful group of people. 

Marketing my caricatures: Gigmasters has revamped!

My live caricature service has long been available on Gigmasters, which is a very popular online source for party entertainment. Last week, the powers-that-be there decided to reveal their completely revamped website, and after a few hiccups, it seems to be a good thing!

There's now a cover photo, inspired by Facebook, and lots of other small changes which make it very easy to choose and book entertainers and most importantly, be assured you are getting a professional. Every client is asked to provide feedback after their experience, and I've been lucky enough to get great  reviews and also to have a very high feedback-to-number-of-clients ratio.

 In addition to making a brand new cover image for my Gigmasters page, I decided to replace some of my older caricatures with more recent ones. In some ways, it was tough to part with some of the samples, as they'd been there since the get-go, and obviously worked well to get me booked!

Gigmasters is also using their Facebook page to get more fans…and they are giving away free memberships or membership upgrades to some of those fans. So feel free to check that out!

Now, I'm off to a Gigmasters gig this evening! :-)

A 1st birthday party with high-speed caricatures...

Sunday's second event was a family birthday party which found its way to me through Entertaining ConXections. The client needed a large number of people to be done in a two-hour time frame…so, to step up my drawing speed to 17-20 faces per hour, (normally I do 12-15)  I left out my customary shading---and here are the results:

 A 20% gray Prismacolor marker was used for some slight shading instead of my beloved black Prismacolor artstix. I missed being able to shade subtle things like rosy cheeks, as well as major things like dark hair. However, I mentioned to all the parents that copies of these make great coloring-book-style projects for their kids to go to town on with their Crayolas. :-)

Here is a link to one of the masters of this particular style of live work, Mike Giblin in the UK. I checked out his stuff for inspiration before I did this gig.

A snowy morning gig...

We don't usually have much snow in December in these parts (January is another story) but I have been getting used to scraping it off my car before going to holiday gigs. Sunday morning brought another few inches, luckily it didn't keep me (or the guests!) from attending this breakfast-with-Santa at a country club. And finally I got a glimpse of the red-suited man himself!

This couple told me they had previously been drawn by a gentleman caricaturist wearing a beanie hat with a propeller..I told them that could only be my friend and colleague Dave "Bippy" Boyer. They exclaimed, "Yes!!"

Thanks to 513 Entertainment for this one! :-)

Another holiday party

Saturday morning found me at another holiday party...this one was for kids and for some reason I drew mostly girls and hardly any boys!?

This was taken about ten minutes before start time…the line was fully formed!

I skedaddled home ASAP after this event as it was starting to snow heavily.

Holiday party

I've been doing this holiday party at a vocational training center for a long time…long enough to know the some of the guests by name!

The holiday spirit is everywhere!

Thank you for having me! This is one of my favorite recurring gigs of the year. :-)

Holiday party for auto dealership...

Part of my pleasure at doing what I do is the drawing-the-subject phase of a caricature…the other part is enjoying the chain reaction when they and their friends lay eyes on it!

This was from a midweek afternoon gig, in a grand auto showroom that had been cleared out for festivities for all the dealership's employees. They'd put me and my easel in a prominent alcove and hung printed caricatures (that they'd pulled off the internet) around so no one would miss what I'd be doing! :-) Don't know whose Beatles that is, but I might know the artists behind some of the other examples.

Happy holidays--- and my client said I may be returning next year for this party! She even had feedback up for me the next morning.

Thank you, Gigmasters!

A blast from the past: wedding caricature

I had a happy surprise last night: one of my earliest digital caricatures turned up, as I was checking out what the hashtag #caricature had to offer on Instagram: 

Not sure what year this was, (late '00's) but I recall using my very first Wacom Intuos tablet to do it, which has since bitten the dust. My comment got a lightning-fast response from the client, which I am sharing here.  

Point being: caricatures delight people for YEARS afterward!

Click here to see my Instagram page. 

A Christmas-y 8th birthday party...

for an eight-year-old and her friends, was my second event on Saturday:

In two hours, I did fifteen caricatures…all full color, with bodies and themes. There were the popular ones I'm very used to creating, like Princess, and Singing, and Gymnastics,

but there was a new one this year inspired by:

Elf on the Shelf is THE big thing this holiday season. The birthday girl got two caricatures; she was drawn as the Elf, who was perched on a table next to their tree (and also as a HipHop ballerina, below)

The littlest guest wanted to be---what else…a Princess!

Thank you for having me, and I am glad everyone liked their Victoria's-8th-birthday party favor! 

Cupcakes and caricatures, a sweet combination

Found myself at a sugary confection of a party yesterday: the 1st anniversary of ICED by Betsy, a gourmet cupcake bakery housed in a beautifully restored old train station:

Lots of families came in for a free cupcake, raffles for more artfully decorated culinary creations, fabulous faces by Sunny Face Painting, some yummy hot chocolate, and a chance to meet Betsy and her staff!

Dozens of my caricatures went home with Betsy's logo on the bottom and her signature cupcake drawn on them--somewhere. They went over so well, that Betsy doubled my time drawing. :-)

And here's what I went home with! THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME, BETSY!!

MMMMMM... I have to concur with Betsy's fans…these are some of the best cupcakes I have ever tasted. Saving some for the Other Half is gonna be tough to do!