Faces for Radio

Q104, the local rock station, and their sister station Kool FM, hired me recently to caricature all their on-air talent. These were all done 16" x 20", and will be hanging in frames on the wall in the station.

 They had me re-draw this one many times! This was not the final, but it was the one I felt looked the most like her.

PAAAARTYYYY!!!!! WOOOOO!!!!YEAH!!! MORE SPECIFICALLY, WEDDING PAAAARTYYYYY!!!!! WOOOO-HOOOO!!!

I don't often post my commission work, but this was a project I was particularly happy with, and it was mostly because the client was a dram to work with. He commissioned caricatures, from photos, of his wedding party o give them as gifts. He never once haggled over price; he sent at least 5 photos of each person to be drawn, all taken from different angles; he made no unreasonable demands; and he had no problem with me exaggerating people's features. In fact, the more i exaggerated them, the more he seemed to love the results. With the exception of the first one, that is. That was the only one on which he asked me to tone down the exaggerations, and personally, I feel like that hurt the likeness somewhat, but he was happy with it, so fair enough.

Feedback is welcome.

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!

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.

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: