21-person digital caricature...

Whew! I managed to fit them all in! :-)

This is a pen & ink style digital caricature of a very special matriarch and her family. They celebrated her 90th birthday recently, and my client (one of her grand-daughters) wanted something amazing to adorn t-shirts they'd all be wearing. This was loads of fun to concoct, (her bridge cards and favorite college football team helmet are in the mix, too) and I can't wait to see photos of the shirts. :-)

Home from Asia and Europe!

My blog has just had the longest hiatus in its almost-five-year existence: my intrepid Other-Half and I went on a month's journey to Thailand, with a four-day jaunt to England tacked on at the end. :-)
My son happens to live in Bangkok, which is about as far as one can get from Philly without being on the way back. It was my first time overseas (unless you count the Caribbean) so I was very excited about:
A. seeing my son after a year and a half
B. seeing sights, eating exotic dishes, and soaking up foreign climes
and
C. finding art/caricature related stuff to share here.
Here's the Other Half, and my son and I, in a water taxi along one of Bangkok's many canals.

So to begin sharing what (little) drawing I actually did, or what I witnessed, on the looooong flights there I doodled Miss S. Germanotta from a magazine. Luckily, I like to do tedious crosshatching sometimes, because there was plenty of time for it:

There's plenty more to come, from street artists to medieval gargoyle faces, once I find the relevant photos among the 18 GBs I took! (video too.) But first I have to get ready for a gig tomorrow---my last one was on February 5th, which may have been my longest break from THAT in a loooong time too!

First thing I've signed 2012 to...

Doodled this of some strangers early this week. Everything I do always turns out somewhat caricature-ey! And I made sure the lady never got a gander at my sketchbook...

Caricaturama-Patricia Arquette

I've only ever seen this week's Caricaturama subject in a few episodes of her  TV show, Medium, and I thought she was pretty blah, but her haircut was fun to draw...

This one is a Markette-Micron--Pentel brush pen-sketch with a dab of PS hatching on top.

My latest Awkward Faces entry...

This week was the deadline for the Awkward Faces sketch group on Facebook. Since I won the last round, I got to choose the photo everyone drew, and I put up a recent one of my S.O. meeting Tim Minchin. Click here to see: my reference pic. Here is what it mutated to:

There were some pretty phenomenal other entries! Check them out here. The winner was my friend Mr. Bob East, who came up with an excruciatingly awkward version...

People-watching doodles

Right now, I am readying my caricature kit-and-kaboodle for this weekend's gigs, and just found these doodles from last Saturday's rain delays...

Yes, the man on the left is wearing a kilt, accessorized with Keds. He had a bowtie too, but wasn't facing me enough to get that in.  The other two guys had interesting stances. I used my Copic multiliner pen for these, in live caricature it's good for eyelashes, thin eyebrow hairs, and stubble.

As long as I have a pen or pencil and paper, if there's people around to draw, I'm never bored...(actually, my other boredom-killer is playing Tetris on my phone. Which is another subject unto itself :-)

Pen and ink inspirations, musings...(and contest)

I've always loved pen and ink artwork, from the time I was a kid. Some of my favorite books were illustrated  in this fashion. Long before I knew about caricature (and pen & ink greats like David Levine in particular)  these are what my eyes devoured and aspired to...

  The first person who can name all six artists  (and respond on my FB caricature page) gets a pen & ink caricature from me! Five of these artists were in my book collection as a child, and one I discovered as a teenager. I don't know how much they've actually influenced my work, but to this day I am still excited by dip pens, Rapidographs and Microns...

...which brings me around to this piece, done with the aforementioned Microns. It was a submission to the FB group Awkward Faces, where the goal is to cartoon/caricature a submitted photo of non-celebrities as awkwardly as possible! Compared to the behemoth which is Caricaturama (over 4000 members), AwkFaces is miniscule, but the talent pool is amazing, so I was pleasantly surprised to have won this week. Here's a link to the target photo, so you can see what I had to work from:

My favorite comment about my piece was that it was "delightful and cruel", a combination I'm not used to hearing, and two qualities found in several of the pen-and-ink examples above.
My live work  definitely slants towards the delightful most of the time, with a slight tinge of underlying cruel (especially of adults). It's a line that all caricaturists have to decide where exactly theirs lies. Without "cruelty" it's not a caricature. Without "delightful" it won't appeal to a broad spectrum of people...

...but with illustration or political caricature, the percentage of "cruel" can go way up!

Another Philly-centric wedding save-the-date card

I seem to be doing these Philly-landmark digital pen & inks on a regular basis (thanks to people finding them here on my blog! :-)

This couple customized theirs with the Phanatic doing the King Kong routine---and their dog doing the Snoopy-as-Red-Baron routine! While things like that make it enjoyable for me to create, it also makes their save-the-date card very particular to them and should give their recipients that knowing smile of recognition.

Caricaturama-Alan Rickman

This week's CS3K challenge is an actor with a mesmerizing voice, especially if one likes British accents!

I don't usually care for action movies, but when the first Die Hard came out, Mr. Rickman as the ultimate bad-boy Hans Gruber shook me from my (then) allegiance to Bruce Willis. Below are the stages this piece went through--it was a pen-and-ink before I decided to paint it.

Most of the other artists are rendering him as his character of Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies, a role JK Rowling said she always envisioned him playing.

'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!

Osama is no longer with us...

...but it isn't going to stop terrorism. :-(

He is this month's ISCA forum subject. Digital pen and ink.

Caricaturama Showdown 3000-Brigitte Bardot

This week's challenge is French screen siren Brigitte Bardot, whom John Lennon worshipped as a young man...to the point that his first wife Cynthia revamped her hair color, hairstyle and clothing choices to emulate her for him.

Digital pen and ink, took about 2 1/2 hours.

Digital pen & ink...and not a caricature for once!

I was recently commissioned to illustrate a save-the-date card for an upcoming Philly-centric wedding. No faces desired, just architecture!The LOVE sculpture is certainly appropriate here!

My client wrote: "It looks amazing and is exactly what I had in mind..."

:-)

Freddie Mercury--digital pen and ink study.

Not a caricature, but more of a stylized portrait, this man's features (and voice, and songwriting) have always intrigued me, and maybe that's why I find him difficult to caricature. His teeth are an obvious target for many caricaturists, but there are so many other things that make him worth a second look.

Part of the reason his looks seemed so exotic, and wasn't really widely known until after his death, was that Freddie Mercury was a member of a tiny ethnic minority, the Parsis, based in India, but which originally came from Persia (modern-day Iran). His birth name was Farrokh Bulsara, and he attended an English boarding school in Mumbai for most of his childhood. The Parsis, who follow the extremely ancient Zoroastrian religion, have intermarried among themselves for generations; as a result, they have a characteristic look and Freddie was a good example. Even his famous teeth were due to a common genetic mutation in Parsis--he and his mother had extra molars which pushed out the front incisors. There are only an estimated 100,000 Parsis left throughout the world today.

Freddie downplayed his background during his lifetime and instead embraced the British rockstar lifestyle. In this wonderfully done caricature (which I have not been able to find any information on...I'd love to know who the artist is/was, and the circumstances of its creation) which graced the sleeve of the 'Somebody to Love' single in 1976, it's obvious that Freddie and the rest of Queen had an affinity for our artform!

Yet another reason I find him so interesting: he was an accomplished artist! He didn't call himself one, in the 'painterly' sense of the word, but Queen's logo and their visual sensibility were all Freddie's. And you can't look at this pencil sketch of Paul McCartney, done while Freddie was a college student (he had a degree in graphic design) and not be impressed by its likeness and sensitivity.

I find it amazing that Freddie drew one of his musical idols while in college and ended up singing onstage with him at Live Aid twenty years later!


And now it's been almost twenty years since Freddie's untimely death and his talents are still missed by many.

Sparkly vampire boy and his GF

I'm on a mission to caricature some current hot celebrities,to use as both airbrush samples and digital portfolio pieces. Here is the dreamy (if you're a teenage girl) duo from Twilight....this is the very preliminary rough sketch.

And here's a link to MY favorite vampire....

Pen & Ink Caricature/portrait commission

I had the opportunity to create a very different, thoughtful gift for a recent client...she wanted to give a special professor something to thank him for his help in her receiving a PhD. She had me replicate the style of an old woodcut/pen & ink drawing of scholarly St. Jerome, only with a twist---now it's her advisor, surrounded by the mind-expanding technology of today...

...so his bookwheel (which he actually owns) and office are where you'll find him with his Kindle, Mac laptop, flash drive, Blackberry and desktop with the omnipresent Facebook page on display!
This commission was alot of fun for me. I used to do many pen & ink portraits of people, pets and houses before I became a caricaturist, but I hadn't done a digital pen and ink before. Because we did make some changes along the way, this was an absolute boon, not to mention, doing it digitally fit in well with the whole theme of this drawing---newfangled ways of doing things people have done for hundreds of years--learn, communicate, and DRAW!
My client had lots of good ideas and references for me. Her reaction to the finished piece was: I love it! Thanks so much. It turned out even better than I had originally imagined it.
She was to present a framed version to him today. :-)
I love my job!

September (and August's) NCN contest

Last month's challenge was Elton John. I drew a younger, more outlandish version of him on the almost last day. The winner was Pete Emslie, whose work has been inspiring a lot of NCNers lately!
This month, we're attempting Audrey Hepburn. I hope to get back to this, to flesh her out a bit in color.

Yet another caricaturist colleague...

I am working on several digital commissions this week that can't be shown yet, so here is another quick sketch of a fellow NCN member--Bertrand, from France. This is again done with the gray Pitt brush pens, and an additional light blue Prismacolor marker.

More Firing Squad colleagues...

I attempted a somewhat simpler style of sketch for these three artists...Dave, Pete,and Lou, with varying levels of exaggeration.

Another colleague...

This caricaturist lives in London, England, and I've actually met him at an NCN convention.
Congrats on the new baby, JP!