Emily's blog is on hiatus for the moment...

...how's this for a caricature? :-)

Sweet 16!

On Saturday night, I had a blast drawing at a Sweet 16 party held in a very hip restaurant that featured interesting minimalist decor and conveyor-belt sushi! The birthday girl and all her friends were total sweethearts:

The lighting which made the atmosphere so trendy necessitated the use of my battery-powered clip-on lamp. The restaurant really had no areas roomy enough for my easel, (let alone near an electrical outlet for my standard lighting) so I sat in the lounge and used my clipboard, drawing a few girls at a time...

The girls sat at the super-long table (back right)

One nice thing about being in a crowded restaurant is that a few people who were not party guests asked for business cards! After I'd drawn the girls and the new 16-year-old's brother and parents, the management of the restaurant asked me to stay on and draw them, as one was leaving due to a promotion. So here they are!

I love my job....I think I've mentioned that a few times on this blog :-)

Jazz Festival preview party

Last night, I was part of the ambiance/entertainment at the preview mixer for the upcoming Chester County Jazz Festival, being presented by Sugarbaby Events. For openers, we first got to enjoy (video snippet below!) hearing Henderson HS's Honors Jazz band:

It's becoming a social-media-savvy world we're living in: the big screen carried a live image of Tweet Chat, people were encouraged to Tweet ( #chescojazzfest) about our evening and we could see it right there bigger than life. Of course, I did too:

Now for some faces from the easel:

I drew her bosoms well--but I missed this gal's dimple...I'll have to see if I can connect with her (through social media, of course!) and fix that somehow!

 The last band of the evening was smoooooooooth jazz. :-) (video snippet below, too)

See you this summer at the Chester County Jazz Festival! June 30-July 1 in West Chester, PA!

Acrylic painting FINISHED...

Oftentimes, people ask caricaturists: "Do you do real art?" (The more tactful will say,"Do you do any other kind of art besides caricatures?) I usually say no, that I stay busy with caricature, and besides I love the art form. Once in awhile, I'll venture into other genres, but those projects tend to stay on the back burner...not today, though! 

This is a personal commission that I procrastinated on for a year and a half...

Nekoda's Jungle 24"' x 36" acrylic

It's also the biggest canvas painting I've ever done, with a cast of...many. It's even varnished--that was the only thing I had to buy to get it done. (Some of my acrylic paint tubes are decades old and they are still usable!)

Go backwards in time with me:

The boar and the deer had been added at various visits by my friends Celestia and Marlo.

Above: This is the state it stayed in for a long time....About two weeks ago I decided to finish it---adding butterflies, beetles, a hippo, a panther, a cheetah, a lion, a zebra, a sloth, a gazelle, a hyena, and various flowers. 

More canvases now await me (not this big!)

January corporate party...

Sometimes, companies enjoy having their 'holiday' parties in January, then they don't have to deal with December's hustle and bustle. This one was on Saturday night, in another lovely 19th-century mansion that's been refurbished into an event venue...
I had some very willing sitters, all couples:    :-)

They don't make staircases like they used to!!

Here is that last couple's reaction--such a cute laugh!!

A 6th birthday party for twins...one of whom shares my name!

Saturday afternoon found me in the warm, fuzzy atmosphere (literally, it's been a warm winter in these parts) of a family birthday party for a pair of six-year-old twins. The girl twin, Emily, got to have her name emblazoned on her caricature to excess: my website, my signature, her name and the party name!

In two hours I was able to draw twelve kids in full color with bodies and themes--dogs were popular at this party:

And I LOVE drawing aliens in spaceships, with dubious spectators:

Or just dancin' with personality:

I didn't get a photo of Emily's twin brother Benjamin, but he had an awesome dinosaur hat he'd made himself. After the kids were done, I got in five adults before having to hustle off to another event.

While drawing the client and her hubby, I asked how they'd ended up having me at the party since Gigmasters (where they'd booked me) offers so many choices. She said they'd wanted a lady artist so the kids would feel comfortable, and then they saw my name was Emily, too!! So I jokingly said, you did look at my samples, I hope??? After laughing, she said that my video of caricature reactions was what sold them.  :-) :-)

Here is the feedback she provided to Gigmasters this morning:
Emily was the best - personable, patient, just went with the flow as we shuffled guests in and out of her chair - our guests have been calling all morning about how much fun it was to have Emily draw for our party and the kids were so excited to have something special to take home rather than a goody bag that gets tossed out the next day!


Thank you for having me! I love my job.

Another great video from our 2011 ISCA con

Fellow artist and videographer Brian Vasilik of North Carolina just put up his video impression of our most recent ISCA con on Vimeo...lots of great shots of caricature art being created and enjoyed.
Below: I made the cut! Screenshot from about five minutes in---watercolor of me by the talented Mr. Court Jones....

Oh, my freezing hand(s)!!

My drawing hand is always cold in the winter, especially when I am using my Wacom tablet...

My untalented left hand gets cold too, but somehow, the one I am using most seems to suffer the most. So I snipped off the fingertips of a pair of gloves and voila! Help for the poorly-circulated freezing appendages. The digital image onscreen is a sneak peak of this year's upcoming Texas comic for Exaggerated Features by Celestia Ward and myself...

My friend Johanna Veerenhuis-Lens

Over the years of attending NCN/ISCA conventions, I have made many wonderful friends from all over the world. A special one to me is Johanna Veerenhuis-Lens of the Netherlands, whom I first met years ago at one of our Orlando cons, but also bumped into at Salt Lake City's airport while we waited for a connecting flight to Reno...

 ...anyway, we've been friends ever since. This photo is from our 2011 ISCA awards night, where she won 2nd place for 3D caricature (to add to her growing collection :-)

She started out as a party artist like me, but three years ago discovered that her true passion was caricature sculpture...specifically Sculpey sculpture. Since then, she has won lots of awards, written a book, and opened a museum with her husband in her lovely barn home where busloads of visitors come, see her creations, and learn about what she does. This year at the con she gave a seminar and shared her book with us.
Here is my copy: it is half how-to, and half motivational:

I certainly love what subjects she sculpted for the cover!!

This year, she has been asked to showcase all her sculptures that were on display in a new Museum of the Twentieth Century in Hoorn, the Netherlands.  In order to do that, she'll be closing her own museum, and is now putting out the word that she is currently taking new sculpture commissions. Click here:  commission Johanna if you'd like to look into doing so (site is in Dutch, but it's pretty self-explanatory-- or you could call her, she speaks English with a most appealing accent ;-)

I am so happy for her success!

O's Fanfest 2012

Yesterday, on the first sleety/snowy day of the year, some people's thoughts were jumping way ahead to spring, and baseball season in Baltimore...

It was O's Fanfest day, and even though Baltimore's NFL team, the Ravens, are hot,  hardly anyone was wearing their purple--but there was lots of  Oriole ORANGE in evidence---and we were drawing it!

I was part of Rick Wright's A-team:

My easel is sandwiched between Gary "Toonboy" Smith's to my left, and Dan Ginter's to my right.  I'd never actually seen Dan work live except at conventions, (where the motive is not to please customers!) and very much enjoyed seeing him do these lushly colorful, appealingly alive pieces, using the chalk-and-glove technique:

Above: by Dan Ginter. Below: by Gary "Toonboy" Smith.

Gary is a big fan of "defunct 60's and 70's sitcoms" (his words, not mine) so he was pretty happy when this young lady sat in his chair. He asked her parents if they realized their daughter bore more than a passing resemblance to the Partridge Family's Susan Dey...they hadn't, but agreed---now that he'd mentioned it!  :-)

Thanks to Rick, for having me. Here he is, drawing away:

And here's a photo he took of us, before the onslaught:

L-R Dan, Gary (whose face Stan Laurel seems to have possessed) and myself.