Happy 11th anniversary to my Caricature Blog!

I've been blogging, consistently for the most part,  about my caricature art career for 

ELEVEN YEARS!

My very first post was about a Bar Mitzvah I did way back in April of 2007. This is one of the young guests, and there are several things I'd do differently now, but overall it's a presentable effort. At that point I'd been caricaturing full-time for only three years. 

Blogs were THE thing on the internet back then, and have waned as other social media exploded in influence, but I have maintained mine because it serves as a chronological visual diary of my growth as an artist. It also shows all the cool folks I've met along the way. And updating it frequently helps me to find new clients by being able to show them, with one link, all the other parties similar to theirs, that I've done. VIVA  la BLOG!

This Artist Finally Got Married...and yes, there were caricatures (and caricaturists!) at our wedding

My Other Half and I finally did it in 2015! 

We had a sunset wedding ceremony in November, in Valley of Fire State Park---which is about an hour northeast of Las Vegas, Nevada. Joining us was a small group of friends and family. It was absolutely beyond beautiful. 

We highly recommend Scenic Las Vegas Weddings. :-)

After the ceremony, we had our wedding dinner at Mon Ami Gabi, which is directly across from the fountains at the Bellagio; we had a lovely view of them! 

Then we had a cozy reception in our hotel suite, which overlooked the famous Las Vegas Strip, and which is where the caricatures came in...

Four dear friends gifted us with various art forms:

My matron of honor, Celestia Ward, not only baked and decorated that fabulous cake, (it was a scrumptious vegan pineapple-upside-down cake, with bordeaux-maraschino-cherry layers) but she sculpted the witty little cake topper of us as well!!!! I can't thank her enough for all she did in helping us pull off our wedding. 

Another dear, dear friend and Master Caricaturist, Jan Opdebeeck, painted this fantastic digital caricature of us, which he sent to Celestia, who printed and framed it. The calligraphy on the mat was done by another delightful friend, Jeff Redford....I was so floored by all this! Then I cried!!!! (with happiness, that is!!! ;-)

Sooooooo us. Thank you, thank you, thank you, dear Jan and Jeff!!

We had all our guests sign it (and now it hangs in our bedroom.)

Celestia started it off the signatures, as was fitting, because she coordinated it.

Here's Marlo and her husband Nick doing the honors, in her dress and his tie adorned with Emily-and-John-faces (!!!!!!!) that Marlo made just for our wedding! 

Marlo was responsible for making me look the best I've ever looked in my life...she did my wedding makeup. (My hair was done by a gal in Shag Me Salon, home of great retro hairstyles. Dress was from Trashy Diva and my freshwater pearl jewelry was handcrafted by another artisan I've met through my work, Johnis at Lucky Find OCNJ).

I have such amazingly skilled friends. Just amazing. :-)

Our wedding favors for our guests were more little pieces of art. Celestia hooked me up with a local artisan, Beth Bishop, who handcrafts all sorts of interesting pottery.  I bought sake cups for everyone, since we planned for a sake toast instead of champagne. Then I folded up little gift bags (thank you, Pinterest!) tied with a tag featuring my pencil drawing of the bride and groom's eyes. ;-)

The last thing we did on our wedding day (it was almost midnight by then) was walk from Mandalay Bay to the Las Vegas sign for the obligatory photo. In sneakers, I might add!

On the first day of our marriage, we caught the Beatles LOVE Cirque du Soleil show. 

So perfectly fitting for us Beatlemaniacs!

Our honeymoon was a quick jaunt through some perfectly astounding natural wonders: Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and finally, the Grand Canyon. Couldn't take too much time, because our whole wedding and honeymoon trip had to fit in with my gig calendar!!!

Yes, it was cold.

A  long time coming, but this new husband and wife are very happy. :-)

Now back to caricaturing!

Homeowner Man, High School and April Fool's Day

As an event and studio caricature artist, my clients can come from ANYwhere. They can be folks I know, folks who know people I know, or strangers. Or they can be folks I went to high school with...and due to life taking us in different directions, haven't seen since graduation day in 1982!! (ok well, Senior Week then. ;-)

Facebook has eradicated the oblivion that our generation's friends disappeared into, as adult life encroached. Unless you were an inveterate letter-writer or phone caller back then (when it used to be expensive) there were probably plenty of people you thought of fondly and wondered 'whatever happened to'. So, it's nice that FB reconnected so many of us.

I've done quite a few drawings for folks like that. All of them, until this one, were private commissions. Oh, I've displayed them on my blog, but didn't share who my client might have been...

This one is a little different.

This is Homeowner Man, the alter ego of my friend Steve. Since re-friending each other on Facebook, he's seen me do all manner of caricatures...and was inspired.
In the bowels of stately Homeowner Manor, he hatched a plan to dominate the blogosphere with his humorous Homeowner Man musings (which he's been penning for years) illustrated with a Caricature by Emily.  Read them, you will laugh! I like this one.

When he approached me about doing a caricature for him, I was excited. It's fun to do super-hero caricatures, even more fun when it's a completely hilarious super-hero with his own blog (not to mention the prospect of illustrating WifeGirl and SonBoy at a later date! ;-)

When I received the reference photos, I was floored. I already knew Steve looked like he'd aged about six months since graduation..but the photos were every caricaturist's dream to work from. You wouldn't believe how often we get postage stamp size, lo-res, super-pixellated photos of subjects (in harsh sunshine) from twenty feet away and we're expected to draw a caricature from that?? Steve's pics were hi-res and from lots of angles. These are just three of the dozen-plus he sent:

He said his son had fun doing a photo session for the project. So, thank you, SonBoy!

Steve pretty much allowed me to art-direct myself and was quite happy with the results, as was I. 

He was happy enough to give me a completely over-the-top review on my Yelp page:

Then Homeowner Man added his thoughts on his blog (skip the Yelp thing, he posts that too)...although his super-mind's remembrances need some calibrating because I definitely did not own the car he mentions. My bad. ;-)

It's April Fool's Day today...remember those reference photos for the caricature?

 Resourceful Homeowner Man found another use for them---taping them on doors all over his house and scaring the crap out of himself and Wifegirl, but not the intended victim, Sonboy! Haha!

Finally, there IS a photo of both of Homeowner Man and Caricatures by Emily, courtesy of my dear friend in the front row center. 

This group of seniors from the Class of 1982, (mostly newspaper staff---I was a reporter and cartoonist----tv crew, yearbook staff and other assorted geeks of that ilk) just about to graduate here, went on to become: an actuary, a dentist, a radio on-air personality, a psychologist, an attorney, a writer, an engineer, a marketer....and a blogger and a caricaturist. :-)

I love my job. 

An evening with Steve Brodner...

Recently, one of America's most prominent satirical illustrators, Steve Brodner, took the train down from NYC to Baltimore, so he could spend an evening chatting to folks interested in his work. I was one of those folks!  

I'd actually met Steve once before, in 2004 when he was the guest speaker for ISCA's (then the National Caricaturists Network's) annual convention, in Florida that year. Of course I didn't expect him to remember me, but he did remember that it was a crazy week with us. ;-)

This time, he was sharing his thought process with an audience at Johns Hopkins University.  The evening was actually re-scheduled from 2014...when it was cancelled by a snowstorm. This year's event skated in just after a hellacious ice storm. (But global warming is a topic for another day!) The facilitator for the evening was Tom Chalkley, a delightful JHU professor, caricaturist and friend, who is also the man responsible for introducing my colleague-in-crime Celestia Ward to the world of caricature in her college days. Yes, caricaturists comprise a small, some-might-say-incestuously-small, industry in the larger world of artists. 

Steve gave an amusing overview of his career, his process, and his politics, and told some very witty anecdotes...he is quite comfortable speaking in public, which I find amazing as a visual artist. The turnout was around eighty to a hundred. But the real one-two punch of the evening was the visuals:

The thing I find most inspiring about Steve is how passionate he is about his work, and that comes through when you look at how witheringly he sees his victims. 

(Interestingly, Steve's art is a current subject on an illustration blog I read....

held up as an example of "extreme" caricature. The blogger's opinions don't jibe with mine, as he seems to be saying that Hirschfeld's, Levine's (whose work I LOVE) and Drucker's art fall in a different category as "mere likenesses". Sigh. Anyway, be prepared to read a LOT of LOOOOONG comments if you like debate. 

http://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2015/03/extreme-caricature.html

Too bad it's white text on black too, I hate that!!!)

Back to Baltimore: I had a chance to say hello. :-)

Afterwards,  a few of us adjourned for a pleasant meal....Fellow ISCA members from Maryland Rick Wright and Mike Hasson joined us, along with artist pals Toonboy Smith and Patrick Harnett... and my devoted Other Half.  :-)

Draw, Mike, draw!!! 

Caricaturist meet-up

The doldrums of January are a good time to enjoy downtime from gigs...so last night the Other Half and I went to a caricaturist meet-up at Dave and Buster's in Philly, organized by colleague John Sprague. 

First we eat (and drink), see familiar faces and meet new ones, and then we DRAW.

Here's my output for the evening. :-)

And these are of me...by old and new friends: 

L-R Cartoony me by Terry Laban, NASTY me who draws NICE by Patrick Harrington (I hate you, PAT ;-) ( just kidding, I LOVE it) and cuuuuute me by Mike "Shorty" Robinson.

I'm glad I wore my favorite-est hat.  

Here's some pics of the action:

Shorty and Pat dood-oodling away. Pat is wearing his characteristic smirk. 

Chris Chua, Terry, Debbie Schafer and Shorty.

Sean listening intently. 

Below: Ali Thome, she of the sultry voice in the new caricature podcast "It's Supposed to be Funny" 

and Julie Borysowski, whom I used to work alongside at Phillies games way back in the day...

John and Pat,  two of my oldest friends in the caricature biz: 

 Thanks for pulling this together, John!

DrawInn Vlagtwedde 2014----in the Netherlands

No sooner did I return home from my month in Texas, drawing caricatures at their State Fair, (which I still haven't blogged about!) than I was setting off for Europe (!!!) to attend a caricature-artist mini-convention, called DrawInn Vlagtwedde. Held in the northern part of the Netherlands, for twenty-seven artists from nine countries, the venue was the lovely home of my friends Johanna and Johannes...

The great room of their house, originally the attached barn, was instead an artists's studio for most of the week: 

Well, actually it's always Johanna's studio. She's a sculptor of the highest caliber. So, the creative vibe is ever-present. 

The event was also organized by Jan Op de Beeck, who's been a friend now for more than ten years, ever since meeting him at my first ISCA convention back in 2003. 

I was the only American in attendance. The local newspaper ran a story about the convention, featuring the hostess and her two most distant guests:

Jan asked me to do a slide presentation about my experiences with retail caricature in the US. That was one topic even a nervous public speaker like me could handle!

If you'd like to see many more photos:

This link goes to my album of general convention photos on my Caricatures by Emily FB page. 

And this link goes to my artwork, and the artwork done of me by other attendees...but here's a little preview:

What a wonderful experience! I am SOOOOOOOOO glad I went, and am extremely grateful to the organizers (who are very dear to me). :-)

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.

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. :-)