From Emily's Archives #5: Ringo in pencil

From a sketchbook I used intermittently in the 1980's:

It's from about then because it also had sketches of my infant daughter who was born in 1986.
And I didn't make his hideous great hooter big enough!

'From Emily's Archives #4: Pen & ink house portraits'

Another art discipline I enjoyed in the '90's, which carries into the present day (but digitally now) was pen & ink work, and the occasional house portrait. Back then, it was a painstaking, time-consuming affair; a mistake on the one and only original was permanent if white-out couldn't fix it...

...but now with digital, I can do this kind of style much faster. There's just no original, though!

'From Emily's Archives #3: pastel portraits'

Before I got into caricatures in the mid-Nineties, pastel portraits were my thing. I liked using pastels because they didn't smell or need solvents, and interruptions while working with them were okay (I had two school-age kids and one toddler at the time). This is my display showing photos of completed works from people's photos. Can you tell I liked gray Canson paper? I owned a bunch (still do) of different brands of pastels...Nupastel, Rembrandt, Yarka, and one precious half-size box of Sennelier that were 'like buttah."
It was in the course of doing an outdoor art show with pieces like this, that I first laid eyes on a professional party caricaturist... and you know where that led...

Happy FOURTH birthday to my blog--and first post of 'From Emily's Archives'

I've been blogging about 'my caricaturist life' now for four years---since April 16, 2007!

Of course, I was caricaturing before the blog.

Because of my recent major clean-out-throw-away binge, many drawings and old, old things that were hidden in the black hole of one of my sheds (Yes, I was Mrs. Arthur Two-Sheds Jackson in a past life) have been found. So every now and then, my blog will feature a "From Emily's Archives" post---to illustrate (ha) the erratic path of this particular crayola-wielding, wall-scribbling toddler to a grown-up professional caricature artist. And not necessarily in chronological order. Right-brained people don't work that way...

I'll start with some of my very first celebrity samples from 1996-7, when I did freebies at my kids' school  events:

Instead of Copics and Artstx, back then I used (horrors!) Sharpies and Rembrandt pastels. And my stuff was so stiff! I wasn't fast then, either. There's alot to be said for perseverance...