Craft Fair and Expo Stuff

I've done a few craft fairs, expos for hunting and fishing (a bit scary to see who turned up for that one) and motorcycle enthusiasts (got to see some nasty, wrinkly, leather-clad biker chicks), and other random events like a home and garden show that you wouldn't expect to see a caricaturist at. Let's just say that none of them were too successful, but I was able to do a drawing every now and then that I was casually content with, so it wasn't all for practically nothing.

Here's a musician who set up about 20 feet from me and delighted everyone at the home and garden show with non-stop, loud, put-you-to-sleep folk music all 3 days of the show. When I brought in my ipod and some portable speakers on the second day and played music (at less than one-quarter of the volume of his) that would actually give me energy to stay awake and be able to draw, he "told on me" to the organizer of the event that I needed to turn my music down so that he could concentrate on his. I was amazed that he could even hear my music when he wasn't even playing, but I was even more amazed that a 50-something-year-old man couldn't bring himself to walk over and ask me politely to lower my music himself. I'm pretty sure he was getting his revenge on me for my staring at him while I drew him the previous day. Hey, better than a punch!:



And here's a drawing of the guy who was set up to my left. He claimed to be the inventor of "dessert hummus" and was letting people try free samples of it. He had a large stuffed animal camel on his table to lure people over, so most people saw that thing and totally overlooked my caricature display, which is tough to miss. I kid you not, a woman who was extra enthusiastic about the camel asked me, "Did you see the camel?!" as if I hadn't noticed everyone that passed by it for the previous few hours commenting on it. Best investment for his business he ever made, he said. Here he is (the guy, not the camel):



And here are some live drawings that people paid for (as opposed to drawings I did of people indiscreetly while ogling them from afar):

Fidgety Fellow


Horse Teeth: A Family Heirloom


A Look of Familiarity
If this guy looks strangely familiar to you but you can't quite put your bony finger on it, I'll tell you why, my questioning quails, my wondering whippoorwills. It's my papa! Turns out my dad was helping out with the Parenting Magazine booth at the home and garden show I was at, as he art directs a lot of goodness at that magazine's headquarters, McLean Communications. So he stopped by for a visit, and in a successful attempt to lure in customers, I drew my dad for the first time in probably 2 years. Wow! So many beautiful imperfections that I hadn't noticed before, even from seeing him almost daily in a casually-looking-at-him-kind-of-way. I wasn't able to grab a photo of him then and there, but I found a photo from a couple years ago, so that's why the shirt doesn't match:



Wide-Eyed Grimace
As I got close to completing this drawing, I got a chance to actually look at it as a whole for the first time and got that pang in my stomach that's a fun mixture of guilt, surprise, exhilaration, laughter, nervousness and anticipation that you can sometimes get when you realize that you exaggerated a bit more than you maybe intended or when you think the result is potentially going to get a mixed or negative reaction from the person you're drawing. Luckily for both of us, she loved it and was impressed with the detail so much so that she sang my praises when the next person sat down. I must admit, she has a good sense of humor to like this one:


Square Jaw and Willow Tree
These guys were a lot of fun to draw and talk to, the perfect combination:


Freckled Teeth Freak
This was good therapy (for me):


Notice how he didn't smile with his teeth AFTER he saw the drawing? Better than the other way around though.


Wish I'd made her cheeks pink instead of red.


Lonely Cowboy
This guy was set up at the motorcycle expo with his "artwork." Turns out he's been working on 1 (count 'em: one) woodblock carving of a couple riding on a motorcycle FOR THE PAST 15 YEARS! Apparently he only works on it during motorcycle expos, which means that he pays about $300 each time to work for a couple hours on that carving! He didn't have much skill at it, but he probably liked getting a reaction from people when working live. I think I know where he's coming from, now that I think about it...


Bottom-Lip-Biter
I just kinda gave up after awhile on that sweatshirt design. I think I realized, after it was too late, that it wasn't just an abstract design but actually a dragon. Haha whoops!


Gummy Braces
A really cool kid with an awesome smile.

SeaWorld, San Diego

I know, I know, it's been a while since I've posted, especially since for a couple months I was actually posting a couple times a week. I've been pretty busy. A week or two ago I got hired to draw caricatures for Kaman's Art Shoppes at SeaWorld, San Diego! I'll be starting sometime probably in mid-May.

I had been considering my options for the summer for a few months, and after getting turned down for my private caricature stand proposal by my local amusement park, Canobie Lake, and not necessarily wanting to return to Six Flags, New England for a 4th season with so few friends returning, I imagined the impossibly ideal: drawing in San Diego with the Beastheads: Brian Oakes, Nate Kapnicky, Andy Urzua, Beau Hufford, Aaron Philby, Francesca Nunez and more whose work I have yet to be graced with. If you haven't already checked out their blog (or even if you have, check it out again), bask in the amazingness:
http://www.beastheads.blogspot.com/

Of course, living here currently in New Hampshire made this idea seem like quite a leap of faith (and a leap of location), and that was besides the fact that I wasn't sure whether I would even make it past the interview and be considered for the job, provided that Kaman's was even looking for new hires in the first place.

Aaron recommended I speak to Brian, and a week or so later after a few email exchanges I was talking live via Skype video chat to Brian and Beau who were 3 hours behind my time over there in San Diego. Ever since hearing back from Brian a few days later with the go-ahead, I've been so excited about moving out there and working with those guys that I've actually been having trouble sleeping.

I've started to put in some practice time into using the markettes and art stix they use, which are really quite different from pencil and airbrush (as I'm sure you can imagine), as I'm accustomed to using. If you can't imagine it, or you simply prefer differences being presented as useless and rather stupid mathemillumustrations, then feast your eyes:


I'll be spending the next few weeks putting more practice into that and into getting used to drawing cartoon bodies, the classic SeaWorld animals (sharks, dolphins and whales) and the less popular animals (walruses, turtles, seals, polar bears, fish, etc.). I know I'll get used to drawing those animals pretty quickly once I get out there, but I'd like to be at least a little prepared for the job as well. We didn't draw too many themes or backgrounds at Six Flags, but that kind of stuff is their specialty (along with the obligatory beasting of innocent faces), so I'm eager for the challenge now that I'm a bit more comfortable with drawing caricatures in general. Three years of practice will do that for ya.

Alright, enough blogging; back to practicing!

Flight of the Conchords

Here are Bret and Jemaine from the great show "Flight of the Conchords" on HBO. If you haven't had the pleasure of seeing it, there's a plethora of deliciously dry, British-type sitcom/mockumentary humor mixed with unpredictable, funny song parodies of music from a range of different genres. A very different, fun and catchy show if you've got an offbeat sense of humor and a love for the brilliantly stupid. You can find pretty much all their songs on youtube, for starters.



I decided to use nero lead with watercolor for the first time on watercolor paper. I think I prefer the contrast of those dark and thick lines to the rest of the page compared to the more subtle contrast of 4B graphite. It really makes the figures POP! all that much more. I'm a big fan of contrast. Some pieces don't need as much contrast, but with everything going on in the piece, I found it necessary.

For a while I wasn't sure how I would go about drawing the city scape, which is featured on their official poster and on DVD menu screens and made for a great solution of what to occupy the background with. The lines are fairly consistent in width and are also about as thin as you can draw with nero. That being said, as nero is a type of lead, it needs to be sharpened by rubbing it onto a piece of paper until it comes to a chiseled point, and for extremely thin lines, this needs to be done every few seconds.

An obvious solution came to me after finishing with the linework of the figures. I had several black gel-ink pens which smudge easily but were the perfect width for the linework and had a great fluidity that allowed me to nearly perfectly duplicate the look of that cityscape. I first tried one out on a scrap piece of watercolor paper, and without really even trying was able to duplicate the look of the poorly drawn but perfect-for-the-show skyline drawing. I figured out basic placements and compositions of buildings with light pencil and then went in with the pen, really not spending much time on it, and intending to do that so as to really capture the look of the original.

The next dilemma came from how to go about painting the sky around the figures in a single watercolor wash. Luckily for me, when I checked out a dvd menu screen for reference of the cityscape, there were swirly clouds in the sky, which not only added the whimsical and fun quality of the show but also broke up the blue of the sky so that I could paint that blue in 5 washes instead of 1. Much easier.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this (the negative space of this piece is something I really worked and focused on this time), and it's probably one of the best caricature illustrations I've done if not the very best. Ahhh, progress!!

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!

Color Live Caricatures: Batch 3