Being Caricatured in Bangkok...

Even though our trip to Thailand was a little over a year ago. I juuuuuust got around to making some videos. This one is of the day my son, my Other Half and I got a caricature in Jatujak Market.

Wedding caricatures on a warm winter's day

The relentless winter eased up a bit (to 50° F temps, in fact) so Saturday night's gig was ON! At a hometown wedding reception for a couple who recently got married in Italy, everyone was in a good mood and ready to enjoy themselves.  I started drawing at the cocktail party early on, accompanied by a live trio, Timeless...next to a wonderful sign provided by my clients (the bride and groom):

After a break for dinner, I resumed drawing in another room to the sounds of another live band.  Laughter ensued!

 I got a couple of caricature reactions, but I am rusty at filming these…need to figure out better settings on my phone to get the right dimensions, etc.

Thank you for having me and my caricatures be a part of your wedding celebration, Jaime and Matthew! :-)

Update 2-24-14: My clients just posted some wonderful feedback to Gigmasters about my caricatures!

Thank YOU so much for having me!

5 Stars is not enough for Emily Anthony!! I can't say enough good things about talented Emily and her amazing drawings! Emily was the hit of my party and everyone loved her. I only wish I had 2 of her at my party!! I will definitely be utilizing Emily's services for future parties!

Newsletter shout-out!

My caricatures made the year-end newsletter of the L.E.G.Up Foundation! I drew at their 5k and Spring Benefit Dinner. :-)

Thanks for having me!

Playing the Independent Filmmaker...

...with iMovie. (After all, I DID character---I mean CARICATURE-act in it, shoot it, edit it and publicize it. ;-)
It consists of dozens of my caricature reaction clips  strung together and set to some jaunty royalty-free music.

Social media spruce-ups...

The dead of winter is usually when I revamp some of my online presences…so, I am sitting here with a big mug of steaming Earl Grey tea, doing just that. It certainly helps that I have electricity at the moment  (another snowstorm IS on its way, though. Ugh.)

YouTube now has video trailers and a cover photo, Google+ (which I don't quite understand yet) has a cover photo, and I'll probably find some more things to play with, in my internet meanderings. I decided to use this photo from the  2013 Humanist holiday party for my cover photos: it needed to be a horizontal shot. This is the doctored-up version, to better go with my blue-and-green-background profile pic.

Below is the original version, as taken by my talented Other Half.

I used my favorite workhorse app on my iPad, PhotoWizard, to get the interesting atmosphere. Then I emailed the pic to myself,  and put the text and some more little fairy lights in with Photoshop on my laptop. Click here if you want to visit my Youtube channel.  I chose a trailer that really encapsulates what my caricatures are all about. :-)

Instragram trawling again

I decided to see what was under the hashtag "charactures" on Instagram, and found one of mine! (among a couple hundred others who don't know how to spell "caricature" ;-)

Happy Valentine's Day 2014

My markers and pencils gave of themselves today in the making of this Valentine…which I presented to my favorite raunchy comedienne, Stacey Nightmare, on her Instagram. You can find her stuff on Vine where she presently has 61,744 other followers who love her, besides myself.

 Don't worry, my real-life crush got a Valentine too, but I am not going to show his here. ;-)

Airbrushing something a LITTLE less challenging than caricatures...

Yesterday found me doing something artsy--NOT caricatures---at a college event. Students organized a sweet Valentine's Day activity in their cafe, giving out free airbrushed wooden roses:

They were pre-painted white to begin with; each student received three, of their color choice.

Below: Blue roses were very popular (it's their school color). 

I had to laugh when many of the same exclamations I hear when I'm caricaturing came out of their mouths…only this time, it was merely spritzing some color on a pre-fab item.

"Wow! So talented!"

"Is this want you do for a living?"

"How long did it take you to learn how to do that??" (for this gig, I actually COULD say it was my first time airbrushing roses.)

It was hard to refrain from telling them I could probably do this in my sleep...it felt like I had a secret super-airbrush-power that I wasn't using. But it was still a pleasant endeavor, the results were pretty and the students lined up patiently and were happy to get them. 

After airbrushing for four hours nonstop, (my trigger finger actually ached, and my compressor never shut off!) the giant box of 500 roses the students had provided was nearly empty. So, according to my less-than-trusty calculations, that means I completed around 450, one rose approximately every 30 seconds. I used the assembly-line style; a whole bunch of each color at once. The yellow-pink and blue-green combinations were the most popular, with lots of black-red and purple-pink, too. After finishing up, I skedaddled home to avoid the arrival of the NEXT BIG SNOWSTORM which is currently dropping more than a foot of snow on me and millions of my neighbors…..ugh!

Valentine's Day party for some sweet little girls

On Sunday, in the midst of the power outage at home, I headed off to a Valentine's Day party, in a nearby area whose power had (fortunately!) been restored. When I arrived, I set up as close as I could get to a beautiful (in more ways than one) heat source!

Note all the pink and red markers in my cup!

The party was for two sisters and all their friends, a Valentine-hearted extravaganza in the middle of a dreary winter. After I drew all of them, their mom and I got some cute photos: one with their faces showing, and these two below, without:

This gig came to me courtesy of Gigsalad… in an email which I was able to fetch on my iPhone during the power outage.  Thank you technology, and thank you, Cori, for having me!! 

The ICE STORM of 2014

Haven't drawn anything in my studio for awhile. Last week, our area experienced one of the worst February (or any!) storms I can recall in my lifetime:

Instead of snow, ICE built up on everything, wreaking havoc…branches snapped half the night long in a sickening repetition. It sounded like this: CRACK! (as each branch broke) WHOOSH! (as the snowpack already on it fell the the ground in a little avalanche) then THUD!! as heavy wood hit the ground. 

Amazingly, nothing hit my home or car (I'd moved it to a different spot than usual) but there were quite a few very close calls. Unfortunately, thousands of others suffered major damages. After the storm, came the power outage, at the worst time of year to lose electricity, of course. I missed having heat and my electric blanket more than the internet!!

My Other Half and I got through with the help of a kerosene heater and periodic charge-phone-and-shower visits to my mom, who did have power (she was one of very few.) After almost five DAYS, the lights went back on. Now we're anticipating a foot of snow this week. :-(

Below:This tree is right by my back door...

Here's my intrepid Other Half celebrating a cleared driveway. He chainsawed and we both picked up debris. Not bad for two about-to-be-fifty-year-olds.

People pulled together as they always do in situations like this. At a nearby mulch farm, they obviously wanted to give people SOMETHING to smile about: a three-story snow man!

Creativity! The nose is an orange traffic cone, the buttons are yellow hard hats, and I'm sure it wasn't hard to come by some big branches for the arms. :-)

O's Fans galore...

Another early-morning drive south for me ended up at the Baltimore Convention Center, for Orioles Fanfest 2014. I missed it the last couple of years due to visiting Thailand, but was able to get right back into the swing of it. :-)

Rick had his 'A team' drawing in an orange frenzy..

Yeah, I'm a terrible kid.

All seven of us were kept busy, and somewhat unusually, it wasn't predominantly kids--lots of couples got a caricature this year too:

Above: His parents told me it was a perfect likeness. I wasn't too sure!!!

Here's the scene on my hurriedly-returning-from-the-ladies'-room-break:

Before the festivities began, I found myself in the upstairs Starbucks, above which was a rather interesting, somewhat caricature-y mural of Baltimore scenery and citizens…

This was the second sunset I've seen in 2014 on the way to caricaturing:

Found this online the next day. The caption says the subject had "always wanted to be caricatured but had never gotten around to it" :-)

Play ball! (in two months anyway)

21st birthday…in a bowling alley!

On Friday morning, I received a Gigmasters request for a party that evening! The client was in Sydney, Australia (so we were dealing with vastly different time zones); she wanted to surprise her friend, who is a student (also from Australia) at a university in Philadelphia. It worked out and I found myself drawing amid the sounds of strikes and gutter balls…

He and his friends were pleasantly surprised! I asked him what drink to draw in his hand, and he said "gin" with a grin. (The legal drinking age in Australia is 18.)

Below: some of the attendees, other students from all over.

Happy birthday Justin! Thanks for having me!