"c" the newsman. "c" the newsman run.

i'm not generally much of a news watcher. but i like this guy. good sense of humour, a humanitarian, and not too high on himself. my wife likes him too, but i think for different reasons...

anderson cooper.

see, she's a female and her name begins with "b",see? are you following how this works?

after watching joe bluhm's video in which he does his cartoony caricature of bill murray (see it here), i got in the mood to do another one of my flash cartoonish-style caricatures as well, and what better celebrity to make a carttony drawring of than the cartoonishly cutesy betty white?



that's a pretty stark contrast to my billy idol, huh?

comments welcome.

"b" is also for "bit of a change".

i had to fix up his neck, which i knew, even as i was drawring it, was too thic, so i'm not sure why i went ahead and drew it that way anyway. i also made a few other small changes to details that immediately began bothering me the moment i posted the original drawring.

anyway, the new billy idol:

"b" a man.

here's the b male. i'm not a billy idol fan at all. for emphasis, allow me to repeat that. i am not a billy idol fan. at all. but a guy at work suggested him and i instantly got this visual image, and had to do it. hope you like it. comments appreciated.

a to zed

so, recently, i got the following idea: there are 26 letters in the alphabet, and 52 (26 x 2) weeks in the year. my idea is that each week this year, i will do one celebrity caricature. i will go through the alphabet and draw one guy and one girl for each letter, so by the end of the year, i will have drawn the alphabet in caricature twice. some of these may end up being complete pieces, some may just be very rough sketches, and some may be somewhere in between, but i will try to remember, and to find the time, for one caricature a week.

also, rather than insisting on each letter standing for the celebrity's last name, i am going to allow myself first or last names, or even character names sometimes, thus giving myself a little more leeway when i get to the more difficult letters.

so, to begin, as we are already in the second week of the year, i post my first two caricatures together (pardon the rush job on the shading on both of these. i was trying for relatively quick sketches) :

i may be getting hired for a commission caricature of art carney as ed norton, and since that fit perfectly in with this plan, i decided to do a practice caricature of him as my alpha male, if you will feel free to critique, as i've never watched the honeymooners, and am not really all that familiar with carney's face.



and, since she is the monthly challenge over at e-caricatures, amy winehouse is my a female:



i'm open to suggestions on future letters (although i don't promise i'll use them).

hey! lookit me!

our local newspaper has a smaller, fre version that goes out once a week to some of the suburb areas surrounding halifax (yes, halifax has suburbs. go figure). i was featured in the latest issue. on the front page even!

check it out:

People are drawn to him
Caricaturist Pinsent finds local market warming up to his art
By PAT LEE Staff Reporter
Sun. Dec 9 - 8:25 AM

EASTERN PASSAGE — When Don Pinsent whips up a caricature, there are no do-overs.

When the Eastern Passage artist hires himself out to parties or conventions, he will do the whimsical portraits in black marker, having long ago forced himself to learn the skill by adopting an almost artistic form of tough love.

"I first started just drawing in pencil so I could go back and erase when I made mistakes," he said recently from his home.

"But I decided the only way I was going to learn how to do it was to go straight to the marker. I couldn’t make any mistakes anymore."

Pinsent, an animator at Collideascope in Halifax, has been interested in caricatures since he was a teenager growing up in North Bay in Ontario and reading Mad Magazine, perhaps the bible of satirical drawings.

"I first started off trying to copy their style," he said.

Like Mad Magazine, Pinsent is also drawn to pop culture subjects, with his portfolio including the cast of Seinfeld, Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles and his best-selling take on the Rolling Stones, which he sells online or during the summer on the Halifax waterfront.

"I do them in coloured pencil — full portrait style but still with the exaggerated features," said Pinsent, a graduate of Sheridan College in Toronto.

"What I like doing best is celebrities or people I know personally because I’ve gotten to know their features better."

Pinsent also plies his trade by hiring himself out to parties or conventions, where he’ll whip off caricatures for guests in about five minutes.

He charges by the hour for the service and said it’s a fun way for guests to leave with a memento of the occasion.

"Once I’m there, people start lining up and usually it’s just bam, bam, bam."

People can also commission caricatures by sending him a selection of photographs to work from.

The father of three youngsters said he likes drawing caricatures because they call for a certain level of skill but also allow for some levity.

"I like the idea of exhibiting the skill it takes to do a realistic portrait, while at the same time adding on top of that the skill of stretching the features and having fun with it," he said.

"The reaction I always hope to get initially is a laugh, then in the next breath I hope that people will go, ‘But that’s really well done.’ "

Pinsent, who moved to Nova Scotia about six years ago with his wife Jodi, said he’s been trying to grow his caricature business because the animation industry is so cyclical, with television cartoons always coming and going.

He said his father-in-law, who lives in Bedford, has been a big help in spreading the word about his company Caricatures by Don ( www.caricaturesbydon.com).

"One of my problems is that I’m an artist, so I don’t necessarily have a businessman’s mind, although I’m trying to develop that."

Pinsent said lately all the hard work has started to pay off.

"For the first few years I lived in Halifax I had a really hard time getting it going and then all of the sudden, I don’t know what changed, but in the last year or so it’s taken off."

Caricaturist Don Pinsent works on a self-portrait at his home in Eastern Passage. (PAT LEE / Staff)

man alive, would ya look at the size o' that post!

my website, www.caricaturesbydon.com , hasn't been updated in a long time, due to reasons i won't go into here. but i did a lot of stuff in between the last time i updated it and the day i started this cartoonatorium. stuff that can't be seen anywhere on the intrawebs except various message boards i post on, and there, they're all scattered around and hard to find, should one happen to be looking for them. so i thought i'd post it all here in one big ol' post. this is mostly (all?) stuff i did between customers down at the waterfront during the summer of 2006. kick back and enjoy.

jack nicholson (one of my favourite things i've ever done).



eric clapton (not the guy from "house", thank you very much).



salvador dali.



john lennon.



david bowie (got into a kind of an experimental sort of a mood).



u2 (i'm not a u2, fan but this is also one of my favourite things i've ever done).



angelina jolie (mmmmmm.... angelina jolieeeeeee....).



the cast of seinfeld (yet another of my favourite things i've ever done. it was a good summer).



jimi hendrix (uhhh... yeah. jimi hendrix).



and the rolling stones ('cuz i hated my old rolling stones caricature more every time i looked at it).

alley-oop!

that "alley-oop" pun is hilarious. fact. why aren't you laughing?

i may be making some slight alterations to my keira knightley caricature. in the meantime, here's kirtsie alley.

wow, it hasn't been very long at all since the lsat time i posted.

here's a new one. it took me some time, and i think it's pretty good. i'm not 100% certain, though, because while i was working on it, people would keep looking at it, but not saying, "hey, that looks good."
i guess it's true what they (i) say: people are all jerks.

here's keira knightley.

trying to make up for my slacking

k, a few things today:

first, a sketch i'm not entirely 100% devoted to of reese witherspoon. it seems to me it's almost there, but something i can't quite place just isn't right...



secondly, i've done changes on both my white stripes (again) and my iggy pop. the change to jack white in the white stripes piece is pretty obvious, and on iggy i just made his forehead wider, as i started to feel that narrowing the forehead was unnecessary, and actually hurting the likeness. it's a small change, but i like it a lot more now.





and finally, the one i'm most excited about, my latest full-colour coloured pencil piece. now, last summer, i was at the halifax waterfront with my caricature stand set up just about every day, since i was in the middle of a layoff from my animation job at the time. and between customers, i was working on these coloured pencil works. well, this summer i was actually employed, so i didn't get down to the waterfront as often as i would have preferred. as a result, where last year i finished off some nine or ten new drawrings, this summer, i was only able to get one done. what a rip.

anyway, i like it, and i hope you do too.

indiana jones:

livvin' large

man, i can't believe it's been an entire month since i last posted a new sketch on here! i've been pretty busy. made some adjustments to my white stripes and my iggy pop, which i may post on here if i get around to it kinda thing....

and, i've completed my newest coloured pencil piece, which is indiana jones, which i will also post whenever i remember to scan it.

ennawaze, for now here's another sketchbook pro sketch.

liv tyler.

oh, my aiken ears!

man, i really have to get back to updating more often.

i'm taking a break for a while from the white stripes, which i'm [i]still[/i] not satisfied with. hopefully when i revisit it again, i'll be able to spot what i've been doing wrong.

in the meantime, here's a guy (?) who's pretty much the opposite of the white stripes.

clay aiken.

hey, look! i drew the white freakin' stripes!

next.

two posts in one day! i rock!

just a quick sketch. hoping to get some feedback, as this will eventually become my next full-colour coloured pencil piece. so i want to make sure it looks like him. so be honest. does it? does it? huh? huh? tell me!

it's indiana jones.

ugh.

okay, with things people pointed out to me and things i picked up on myself, i decided this drawring needed a whole lot of revision. o whole... lot... of revision.

i hope this is good now, because i feel like i've been working on this one drawring since God was a kid.

some stripes of the white variety.

wow, this took me a long time. i was never really sure until it was done just what kind of look i was aiming for. i think in the end, i made the right decisions. i like it. i suspect a lot of people will ask me why there's a bumblebee on it. the answer is, simply, i don't know. i felt like it needed some tiny element on it that was not black, white or red, and for some reason, kept feeling like it should be a bumblebee. man, artists are freaks.

anyway, here it is, my newest full-blown finished piece: the white stripes.

this guy should just start playing girls.

so, it's kinda been a while since i last posted anything, because i've been working on my next full-blown finished piece. i've hit a bit of a caricaturist's block with it. not really sure where i want to go with it from where i've got it now. we'll see.

in the meantime, here's another quick sketch.

orlando bloom.

someone should tell him the correct spelling of "william".

all right, enough of the beautiful people like tim curry, robin williams and phil collins! let's get back to drawring the uggers! how's this one: the only guy i've ever seen with eyes that are both sunken and bulging!

willem dafoe.

guy whose last name is also a kind of spice. (i'm a virtual treasure trove of fascinating trivia!)

just a quick sketch today, nothing fancy.

with this guy's talent, it's a shame he's best remembered for what i truly believe may be the worst piece-of-crap movie i've ever seen!

it's tim curry. (see, curry is a spice.)

i miss 21 jump street. don't you miss 21 jump street? i do.

okay, i've never seen 21 jump street. it's still an amusing reference.

k, so i drew johnny depp. i tried a colouring method different from the one i usually use, where i do a regular black and white shaded version first, then lay the colours over top of that.

















but, i'm not sure i like the effect. let's remove the colour layers.



















yeah, that's better. unfortunately, he still for some reason looks like an anime character, which he didn't in my initial sketch. i hate anime. okay, so let's go back to basics. the original sketch layer:



















yeah, that's it! tell me what you think.