me do live stuffs.

i finally remembered this summer to start bringing my camera with me down to my caricature stand at the halifax waterfront and get some pictures of some of my favourites of the live caricatures i've done. i offer two options: for $10, people can get a 5-minute marker caricature; for $20 they can get a 15-minute pencil sketch. as you can see here, the huge majority of my favourites tend to be the pencil sketches, as i am able to take more time and make sure they look more like the subjects, and are more structurally sound.

the main things i've been concentrating on improving this summer have been: 1. pushing my exaggeration in my live work, trying to get it more like that of my "studio" work; 2. composition of caricatures of more than one person, and 3. better observation of the "topography" of individual faces, if you get what i mean by that, rather than just drawing what my brain automatically tells me it should be like.





















this guy was a caricaturist's dream! i only wish he had gotten the pencil sketch. i would have pushed it a lot more!











this kid couldn't stop laughing at his caricature! he loved it!

i can't remember whether i've ever caricatured them before...

the beatles, each from a different era of their career:

contestin' it up.

jerry seinfeld, for the caricaturama showdown 3000 contest:



and salma hayek, for e-caricatures:



but i'm not 100% committed to either one of them.

I'M brian fellow!

i did this tracy morgan foe caricaturama showdown 3000, but stupid facebook, for some reason, wouldn't let me upload it to the group page. stupid facebook. oh well, i wouldn't have won anyway.

andy warhol looks a scream! hang him on my wall...

i did something for this one that i haven't done in probably twenty years or more... i broke out my old acrylic paints! it was a lot more work than i expected, and i'll never again paint outside in the summertime. the sun dries up the paint on the palette faster than i can finish with it! stupid sun!

wouldn't it be cool if rap went missing in action?

so, evidently, there's some girl who goes by the name "m.i.a."? apparently, she does this "rap" stuff that the kids keep mistaking for music these days.

this is for facebook's "caricaturama showdown 3000" challenge of the week.

i'm probably the only one who still cares, but...

three more "lost" sketches, and i'm not done yet:

mira furlan as danielle rousseau:



titus welliver as the man in black:



and william mapother as ethan rom:

FIVE lads from liverpool? what the--?

i wanted to do a new caricature of the beatles, but i wanted to do something i hadn't seen done in a beatles caricature before. tall order. this was what i came up with. it's the silver betales. which is to say, the beatles before they were the beatles, with pete best instead of ringo, and stu sutcliffe instead of... no fifth guy.

shucks, she shore is purdy.

eva mendes, sketched with an actual, three-dimensional pencil, on real, live paper! for this month's contest on wittygraphy.

a little more lost.

here's sam anderson as bernard and l. scott caldwell as rose.

the good-looking ones are often the hardest to caricature.

a relatively quick caricature sketch of myself. the caricaturama showdown 3000 group i'm a member of on facebook recently reached 1,000 members, and they decided to celebrate that milestone with a one-day-only self-caricature contest. the rules state that it has to be a new work done just for the contest, so my old self-caricature didn't qualify.

hey, remember that show "lost"?

...well, here's a couple more characters from it. possibly my two least favourite characters of the whole series. though, i'm sure reading that will prompt someone to suggest someone even less interesting, about whom i've forgotten at the moment, and i will be forced to retract that statement.

ian somerhalder as boone:


and maggie grace as shannon:

king of the vulture people

i'm guessing cnn is still trying to think of the most tactful way possible of firing a well-known, experienced, trusted reporter just for becoming a crazy old man.

it's larry king, for this month's wittygraphy contest. the real challenge here was to come up with something that didn't look just like a hundred of the other entries. no offense meant to the other artists, there are a lot of really good entries. but it's honestly hard to tell a lot of them apart. there are a bunch of them that all from the same reference photo, all done with photorealistic rendering. i wanted to think of a more unique approach. so i went with this 3/4 angle and tried for a more cartoonish render.

losty-lost-lost

malcolm david kelley as walt:


nestor carbonell as richard (those of you who aren't "lost" fans but are still geeks may recognize him better as the mayor from "the dark knight" or batmanuel from the live action version of "the tick"):

what the--- that guys' not from "lost"!

harry shearer, for this week's "caricaturama showdown 3000" competition.

eeexcellent...

hey, look! LOST!

okay, some changes:

first, i took the suggestions offered on a couple of the message boards i frequent, on juliet, and made some minor changes of my own, and i think they really saved the caricature, so thanks for the help, guys.



i also took some advice on jacob, and i'm still not sure. why am i having such a hard time with this guy?!



and finally, my sister, who goes in for all that romantic stuff, said that the only thing wrong with my drawing of desmond was that he wasn't with penny (sonya walger), so here's an update on him:

more lost caricatures (by which i mean not that the caricatures were ever lost, but rather... well, you probably get it.

elizabeth mitchell as juliet (once gain, after multiple attempts, this is the closest i could come, but i'm still not completely satisfied with it. i can't figure out what's not right about it, and would appreciate any input):



mark pellegrino as jacob (once gain, after multiple attempts, this is the closest i could come, but i'm still not completely satisfied with it. i can't figure out what's not right about it, and would appreciate any input):



and harold perrineau as michael (this one, if i may say so, i am fully satisfied with):

blue. period.

i've had this idea in my brain for at least a year now, and have just recently discovered another internet caricature contest that gave me an excuse to put it down. caricaturama showdown 3000 on facebook is a weekly ([i]weekly![/i]) caricature contest. this week, the subject is pablo picasso. i do plan on doing this up as a finished piece, hopefully this summer, but in the meantime, here's the digital sketch:

two greatest obsessions, blah blah blah.

here's three more, but to be honest, i'm not solidly committed to any of them. all three seem a little off in likeness to me, but i can't quite seem to place why. so if anyone has any suggestions, i'm open to them.

henry ian cusick as desmond hume:


dominic monaghan as charlie pace:


emilie de ravin as claire littleton:

my two greatest obsessions... the continuing story.

i was liking my locke drawing less and less every time i looked at it, so i started over, this time scrapping the "gag" and the hack colour job and sticking instead with my usual pencil (tool) sketch style:

terry o'quinn as john locke:


and here are yunjin kim and daniel dae kim as sun and jin kwon:

my two greatest obsessions collide!

well, that drawring i did of locke got me wanting to try again on as many "lost" characters as i can. i drew a bunch of them a few years ago, and thought they were pretty good at the time. looking at them again now, i disagree with me. so i started over. here are the ones i have so far:

matthew fox as jack shephard:


evangeline lilly as kate austen:


josh holloway as james "sawyer" ford:


jorge garcia as hugo "hurley" reyes:


naveen andrews as sayid jarrah:

michael emerson as ben linus:

don't tell me who i can't re-draw!

i made some changes to my locke caricature, based on suggestions from some fellow caricaurists at the drawingboard.

DON'T TELL ME WHO I CAN'T DRAW!

for those who don't watch tv history's greatest television show, "LOST": 1. what's wrong with you? and 2. this is the brilliant terry o'quinn in his role as john locke. let me know what you think.

don't tell anyone i did a funny drawing of him.

i'm not sure it's actually legal to do a caricature of someone this massively respected. oh, well. it's what i do. i can't stop myself.

nelson mandela:

hee hee! he's got a funny name!

here's what i know about archbishop desmond tutu:

1. he's some kind of bishop. i think an arch one.

2. he's funny-looking.

that'll about do it.

streeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep

another month, another e-caricatures contest. this month, it's annual automatic oscar nominee meryl streep. i admittedly got kinda lazy on the hair. so sue me. except don't really.

he's a real heartbreaker.

haven't posted much lately. february got insanely busy at work. but now another layoff has officially begun (hooray for the animation industry!), so maybe i'll be slightly more productive in my caricatures for a while.

i was able to do this one up quickly, though. now, for those of you reading this who aren't artists, here's a little trick artists often use to check the accuracy of their work: flip it. that is, hold it up to a mirror, or, in the case of digital creations, all drawring programs have a "flip" function that allows you to see your drawring backwards. you'd be surprised how different it makes the artwork look. mistakes the artist hadn't previous noticed become immediately apparent...

don't do that with this drawring. i drew it very quickly (in flash), and, even though i didn't have time to fix any problems i might find, i tried flipping it anyway, out of curiosity. it looked hideous! i mean, it looked like a really, really bad caricature. it was weird. so don't do that. just look at it the way it is, because this way i'm actually rather happy with it. it's still not a great piece of work technically speaking, i guess, but i'm very pleased with the likeness.

anyway... here it is, for the e-caricatures monthly contest, tom petty:

and now, because you demanded it: a caricature of some guy you've never heard of!

k, so my friend (don't tell her i called her that) caroline and i have gotten back into doing our lunchtime caricature challenge thingy. we agreed to pick a different theme each week (or something) and draw caricatures of people who fit into that theme. our first theme was people who are famous pretty much in halifax only (or "halifamous", as annoying reporters around here like to say). our first subject was a local comedian named mark little, from a comedy troupe called picnicface (though his stand-up stuff is, in my opinion, much funnier than the group's sketches). it's just a rough sketch, with no shading added or anything. here it is:

what's na'vi for "man, that indian chick is hot"?

these are my entries for two contests going this month:

wittygraphy's contest: bollywood actress aishwarya rai.


and e-caricatures' contest: pompous, self-aggrandizing film director james cameron.

evidently, "the f-word" is "forehead".

forgot i hadn't posted this here. it's my entry for december's e-caricatures contest, that loveable teddy bear, chef gordon ramsay. the kind of guy you can imagine nursing a baby bird with a broken wing back to health. then feeding it live to his cat. then eating his cat.



EDIT: so... turns out i won. cool.

it's calendarific!

k, so i'm a member of an online social networking thingy thing for caricatuists, called wittygraphy. and they took the twelve most popular caricatures of 2009 on the site, and turned them into a 2010 twelve-month calendar, published on lulu, the self-publishing website thingy thing. my amy winehouse was one of the caricatures selected. just in case anyone's interested in ordering a copy of the calendar (it's $19.95 + shipping), i thought i'd post a link to where you can do so. you can find that here. all proceeds go to Dominican Sisters Orphanage in Can Tho (Vietnam) for 17 children in great need. if that helps any to convince you. there are a lot of other really great caricatures in there too, some of them by some of my favourite caricaturists around, including ireland's niall o'loughlin and the disturbingly young william appledorn from the far-away, exotic land of the united states of the americas. i've ordered my copy! you should too! that way, you can be like me, and what could you want more than that?