Claire again
Accidentally slept in, so I figured I'd just throw some quick colour on one of the posts from yesterday. It's been a while since I posted any colour stuff anyway.All this caricaturing has made me think of my old college summer job as a caricature artist. I remember thinking "awesome, now I can practice caricatures all day long"..... wrong. People weren't interested in what many of us think to be a caricature, they all just wanted something I'd liken to a permanent-marker face-lift, they didn't want to be exaggerated, they just wanted to look really hot.
I remember this one woman's boyfriend sat down beside her. She told him to move or he'd be in the shot... like I was some kind of automatic camera that would just keep drawing everything within range. Ha ha.
My other favorite story from that summer was that we also drew portraits (I use that word loosely, as we used cheapy chalk on construction board), the guy who owned the booth (and paid the artists minimum wage) charged 25$ for 3/4 or full face, and 10$ for profiles, because they are generally faster to draw. This one woman politely asked me one day after I explained the prices, that she'd like a profile portrait with a front view. Um...
Around the same time, I had this teacher at Sheridan College, Pete Emslie, who did the most amazing caricatures. It was amazing to watch him draw people, it was always so simply done and really seemed effortless. Anyway, good heavens enough rambling me, but be sure to check out some of the great caricatures on his site.
Comments
Ah, the days of making "pretty caricatures". The best is when you'd get some guy who'd ask you to go crazy and make his big nose really big. 1 out of 200 in my experience.
i've had similar experiences, especially drawing girls. i never did caricatures for a living, but i've had people ask me to draw them, so i just make them look like a comic book super-heroette and they were happy.
I often wonder about doing caricatures. As of yet, I haven't had a chance to do anything like that. That was a great website by the way. That must have been a fun class.
:)=
When the day came that he decided to do me, I was hunkered down working on a project I had to finish. So he sat across from me and sketched anyway. So I received a caricature of my arms, a pencil, eyebrows, and a nose all sticking out from the under the top of my backwards baseball cap. And you know, it captured me just right.
Ha ha, I think if I had drawn people more like superheroes it might have been a more enjoyable summer job :)
Tony, do you still have that caricature?
Funny that you did portrait art during school, too - that was my first summer job when I started high school...worked at Six Flags Arlington drawing portraits and caricatures over by the Southern Palace. Outside. In the Texas heat...over 100 degrees 60+ days my first year (1980) - I poured ice in my shoes to cool off. Learned alot from the other artists, though; and you can't beat all that life drawing practice, heh.
I never write coments while visiting blogs but this is soooooo great...
Hicham
Fan from Morocco...