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?

other people who also ace faces

over the last five or six years, i've been a regular poster on several caricaturist message boards. some of them are now extinct, but a couple (most notably the drawing board and e-caricatures) are still going strong. one of things we often do on these boards is post our own photos so we can draw caricatures of each other. i thought i'd post on here (since i haven't had much time for new artwork lately) some of my favourites of the ones i've drawn over the years. some of these are several years old, some rather more recent; some are digital, some are pencil-on-paper; and some clearly have more time and effort put into them than others. nothing personal.

hope you like them.

alison (i don't know her last name):



ewan mactavish (sorry if i've spelled the name wrong):


chris marie (all the reference photos she posted showed her in low-cut shirts):


a guy who posts under the screen name maester:


a guy who posts under the screen name stilltoon:


william appledorn:


sagan lacey:


chris neuenschwander:


gord macdonald:


juanjo baron:


kaya (i don't know her last name either-- i thought this looked like her, but i'm not sure she agreed. maybe if i were to meet her face-to-face i'd draw her differently):


chris wahl (who drew my favourite of all the ones that have been done of me):


mike hasson:


a guy who posts (or used to) under the name neo noaide:


simon, whose last name i don't remember:


frank zieglar:

people are actually following me!

look at that, i officially have one quarter of a hundred "followers" on the cartoonatorium! woo-hoo! thanks to those who have signed up, and for those who haven't.... it's easy! go ahead, try it!

sorry there hasn't been any artwork posted in a few weeks. busy busy busy. soon, hopefully.

thanks again!

oh yeah, so...

here are the identities of the people in my previous post, for anyone who couldn't tell, and cared:

marty feldman
bruce lee
jeff probst
billy joel
nancy grace
marc singer
anthony stewart head
billy bob thornton
kristen schall
gwen stefani.

bunch of pencil (tool) sketches

hey. been back to work at an animation studio since late august, after an eight-month layoff. more than the work, what i really missed was getting my lunch breaks to do some celebrity caricatures in sketchbook pro. so i've been doing some here and there wherever i can get time. for no apparent reason, i decided with these ones to (1) do them all using only the pencil tool, and (2) hold onto them until i had a big batch i could post all at once. so here they are. they range, in terms of their degrees of fame, from pretty obscure to famous enough that they should be easily recognizable if i've done them right. so see if you can tell who they are. if anyone can guess all ten of them... well, there's no prize, but i'll be fairly impressed, i promise.

it seems she kised this girl, right? and then, uh... yeah, i guess she liked it or something.

a very quick (as i'm sure you can tell) katy perry for this month's contest at e-carictures.

sing along if you know the words: baaaarrrrrump dumpdaadump, badump, daadump, barrump dumpdaadump, badump, daadump...

alfred hitchcock, for the e-caricatures monthly contest. i was trying really hard to find different things to exaggerate than every other caricature i've seen of him... it didn't work. so i threw in the blood spatter just to try to make it different. looking at it again, though, i'm not sure i like it. it's kinda distracting. oh, well. it's just a sketch. i think i might like to take this one further one day, and if i do, i'll decide then what to do with it to separate it from the others.

very witty, wilde. very witty.

i noticed that i'd gotten the nose all wrong on my original sketch for this one, so i changed that in the final drawring. other than that, it's largely the same. i didn't really want the textured paper, but it was the only thing i could find at the art supply store that was the colour i wanted, so i went with it. in the end, i quite liked the effect it gave. all comments welcome.

it's oscar wilde, by the way.

here's tonight's "word": charracctuaterturre.

here's the next one: jon stewart and stephen colbert. pardon the seam. my scanner's not big enough for me to scan these in one piece, so i have to patch the halves together in photoshop, and for some reason, i couldn't get the halves to blend together on this one. i'll have to see what i can do about that. when i'm a billionaire, i'll get me one o' them big scanners, and never have problems like this again. also, i'll have my servants do the scanning for me.

so, apparently there are these people who study these things called "oceans"...

i have this ongoing thingy-thing with the oceanography department of halifax's dalhousie university: they have a decades-old tradition of honouring students who are defending their theses with caricatures of themselves. the backgrounds of these caricatures are generally full of details and visual puns referring to the topic of the thesis in question. they've had several different artists over the years doing them, and i'm the current one (since late 2008, if i remember correctly). i don't claim to understand any of the visuals. i just draw what they tell me to draw. don't try to "get" these. you'll hurt yourself. but here are just a few of my particular favourites:

warning: disturbing image. but look at it anyway.

here's another finished one: frank zappa. i originally had something much different in mind for this, but when i sat down to start it, i realized i didn't have it fully conceived in my mind, and couldn't seem to visualize exactly where i was going to go with it, so i abandoned that idea and went with this one. anyone who doesn't understand this image, check out this zappa album cover:[url]http://intergalacticfunhouse.com/Weasels_Ripped_My_Flesh.jpg[/url].

comments, as always, welcome.

lady? by what definition?

normally, i don't like caricaturing flash-in-the-pan flavours-of-the-month who will be nothing but punchlines in five or ten years, if, indeed, anyone remembers them at all, but this one is the subject of this month's contest at e-caricatures. so... i did.

it's lady gaga.

more people you don't recognize.

just a couple more of the non-celebrity commissions i've done recently, with which i was particularly pleased.

insert political joke here. i have none.

i very seldom caricature political figures, for two reasons: 1. politics bore me. 2. they're so frequently done that i don't see much point in adding another one to the pile, being unable to really bring anything new to them.

but, for some reason, i felt i should have one or two for my sample book at my stand down at the local waterfront, so i did these up. comments welcome.

weird-lookin' chick with a funny name.

Finally! another one! i was originally planning to do these in the alphabetical order i did the original sketches in, but then... i didn't.

didn't change much, if anything, from the original sketch for this one. people seemed to like the sketch. hope you like the final as well. comments welcome.

uma thurman:

sketchy types.

i haven't been posting much new work lately, because i've been very busy with commissions and this temp job i've been at to help fill time between animation contracts. but every now and then, over the last couple of months, i've been taking ten or fifteen minutes to whip up some caricature sketches. i've been trying to go for celebrities of whom i've seldom, if ever, seen caricatured. i guess mainly because they're not exactly yer a-listers. all comments welcome and appreciated.
comedian brian regan:

cat deeley:

harry connick, jr.:

howie mandel:

folk-rock singer-songwriter josh ritter. again, this guy's not hugely famous, but he's become one of my all-time favourites. i highly recommend him to anyone who likes... say, bob dylan or cat stevens:

kyra sedgwick:

and nathan fillion:

how does a treasure troll get to such a position of power?

sorry posts have been so few and, as they say, far between of late. been very busy.
i very seldom draw political caricatures, but this guy was the subject of the monthly contest at e-caricatures, and i've never been one to pass up the chance to caricature a crazy, evil, bomb-weilding dwarf.

kim jong il: