Uhh... Whoops?!!!

So I did probably my favorite caricature of myself 2 or 3 months ago, which I posted on here not so long ago. I was flipping through channels yesterday and the Disney Channel show "Phineas and Ferb" was on. Imagine my surprise when I immediately realized that Phineas, the main character, had a VERY similar look to my drawing. Damn! Did I subconsciously have Phineas in the back of my mind as I worked out this self-caricature??! I think it's very possible. Even though I had never seen more than a few minutes of the show before (if at all) and had maybe seen a commercial or picture or 2 of him, he does have a pretty distinctive look about 'im. Here's a photo of my caricature, a screen shot/promotional image of the show and Phineas' head superimposed over my caricature to best show the similarities. I just mirror-reversed and rotated Phineas' head to match up better with mine:



There are some obvious similarities that most, if not all, of you will pick up right away:
-the overall triangle shape to the head
-the straight line running from the prominent nose straight back to the small, tapering cranium
-the eyes/eyebrows and browridges breaking up the monotony of that straight line, one eye/eyebrow on each side of the line
-the spiky hair shooting off from the end of the squared-off cranium
-the inward curving line running from the back of the head down to the insignificant neck, that line broken only by an ear
-the birthmarks on the cranium (his 3 vs. my 1)
-the striped shirt (not seen in my caricature, but a known staple of my fashion or lack thereof)
-the happy demeanor
-the damn-good-looking-ness

I remember this drawing evolving as I lightly sketched it out. The first epiphany I had was to have the nose head back into the cranium, broken only by the brow ridges. I then sketched out a triangle shape to use as the basis for the head shape, a shape that co-creator Dan Povenmire obviously used as the basis for Phineas when he first drew him. The next brilliant idea I had was to use a curve from the back of the head down to the neck. It all seemed so original and clever, yet I remember seeing this Phineas character last possibly a year or 2 ago and liking the simplicity of the shape of his head. I absolutely did not have this character consciously in mind when I drew my caricature, but it always seemed like it reminded me of something. One person suggested that it looked like the Pink Panther a couple months ago, and I assumed that was the answer. I can see a bit of the panther as well, but it must have been the shapes of Fineas that really influenced me from whoever knows how long ago I had last seen anything related to the show.

Oh well! You're not a hack if you don't know you're copying the artwork of someone else, right? Right??

Robb Miller

Here's a caricature I just finished of fellow caricaturist and buddy Robb Miller:



The Superman thing comes from the fact that he was wearing a Superman t-shirt at the convention, he's a martial arts instructor, and he's kinda ripped. So it was the obvious thing to do.

I met Robb at my first caricature convention in November of 2008. He's a really cool, friendly, talented guy, and I ended up doing a rather crappy drawing of him at that first convention. At the second convention, he took a couple photos of me to do a drawing from, but he was apparently unhappy with how it came out, so a few weeks later he did this great digital caricature of me:



You can check out more of Robb's sweet artwork here:
http://robbmiller.blogspot.com/

Greg is not an alien.

If you haven't seen one of these (3) recent sketches from SNL, be sure to check at least one of 'em out. Funny stuff! Suffice it to say that Greg seems to be an alien.



I impressed myself by actually starting and finishing a new caricature painting the day after I finally got caught up with editing and uploading all the old artwork from September-January. I hadn't done a pencil drawing with watercolor on coldpress watercolor paper since the caricature con, but luckily I fell right back into the groove of using that same technique here, 2 months later. The tough part about this was that it's Bill Hader with a wig and prosthetics making an expression that looks nothing like him. I ran into a similar problem drawing Ben Stiller as Derek Zoolander making the Blue Steel expression. How do you best capture a character's look while still maintaining the actor's likeness? A question for the ages, I suppose.

Here are some links for the Sports Show clips:
Sports Show w/The Rock
Sports Show w/Gerard Butler
Sports Show with Jon Hamm

More Mall Sketches

Like the other mall sketches I posted when I first created this blog a few months ago, these were drawn from people I saw sitting and standing around in the food court where my caricature stand was first located. None of the people I drew ever saw the drawing and only a few realized that I was drawing them in the first place.

Even if I didn't make much money on a given day, if I had drawn a couple mall sketches that I was happy with, I considered it a good day, and after awhile I looked forward to doing these more than live caricatures, as I was finding a lot more freedom with drawing quicker, drawing at different angles than I was used to, and trying to start caricaturing not just people's faces but their bodies, poses and a bit of their personalities. Also, I learned to simplify faces more and learned to draw moving or at least non-posing targets, which helped a lot with all the babies I would draw later.

These were the last mall sketches I did, as I was relocated to a couple other spots where I was busier and didn't have much time between drawings to do sketches. I never got around to scanning and editing them in photoshop till a couple days ago, so they're new to your eyes but not to mine. That being said, these are some of my favorites! These are posted at 75% of their actual size, in case you were wondering...

Mall Sketch #60: Hooded Flier


Mall Sketch #59: Booby Lady


Mall Sketch #58: Lollipop Girl


Mall Sketch #57: Turtle Jacket


Mall Sketch #56: Shaggy Slob


Mall Sketch #55: Globe Squatter


Mall Sketch #54: Hourglass Figure


Mall Sketch #53: Poop Man


Mall Sketch #52: Old Dude with Fork


Mall Sketch #51: Lanky Frog


Mall Sketch #50: Cross-Hatched Crone


Mall Sketch #49: Cross-Hatched Sourpuss


Mall Sketch #48: Pretentious Lashes


Mall Sketch #47: The Mumps

Color Live Caricatures: Batch 4

Here's the rest of 'em: Hope you enjoy!