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:

we got a bogey at 12:00!

the latest caricature contest over at the e-caricatures forum is humphrey bogart. i hoped i might have time to do more than just a quick, rough sketch, but it doesn't look like i'm going to. so here's what i've got. i was trying to exaggerate him differently from what anyone else has done without losing the likeness. whether i was successful in that or not, i leave up to you to decide.

some flights of some conchords

wow, this one a month idea is really not panning out, is it? over halfway through april, here, finally, is post #2: flight of the conchords.

those of you (if there are any) who remember my sketch of these guys from the a to zed thread may recall that the pose was very static and dull. i wanted the final to be something funny, what with them being comedians and all. my original thought was to draw them as the two-headed creature from mel's drawring (fans of the show will know what i'm talking about). but i couldn't find any good reference for that image, so i had to come up with another gag. this was it. people more versed in drawring the human form will doubtless find myriad inaccuracies to pick apart here, and feel free to if you wish, but just know that... well, i don't care. i didn't want to put too much time or effort into anatomical accuracy, i just wanted it to be funny. hope you like it. let me know what you think.

world's handsomest caricaturist. as far as i know.

the main reason i haven't been posting much lately is because, being between animation jobs, i'm using most of my time working on five or six different projects that i never have time to do when i'm working. one of the main things is creating 9with a lot of help from a good friend of mine who does this stuff professionally) a whole new caricatures by don website! i'm excited about it and hope you'll like it. in connection with this, i felt i needed to do a new self-caricature to grace the front page. this is it.

hey, that's not a caricature!

i know, i haven't been posting much here so far this year. been busy with several projects i'm trying to finish before work in animation starts up again. including putting together a whole new caricatures by don website! so that's something for all you huge, rabid fans of mine (donheads, as i understand you like to be called) to look forward to.

in the meantime, speaking of animation, i thought i'd take this opportunity to show you what else i do besides caricatures. this is my animation demo reel, made up of flash animation scenes i did while working at the now-defunct (what a great word!) collideascope animation. it has scenes from the shows "olliver's adventures" and "delilah & julius", as well as my contribution to an experimental project done for cbc's "zed tv", called "exquisite bunny". the reel is a little out of date, since i've worked on several shows since then, but until i'm able to work any scenes from those shows in, this is my demo as it exists.

the music, by the way, is "weird al" yankovic's "fun zone", from the movie "uhf".

enjoy.

can you believe she's still alive?

i think i've mentioned somewhere around here that my intention for 2009 was to take 12 of my unfinished sketches from the "a to zed" project of 2008, (for newcomers to this not-blog who aren't familiar with the a to zed project, search "a to zed" in the top left corner of this page) and finish up one a month, in traditional media (mostly coloured pencil). well, i don't know that the one-a-month plan is really gonna pan out now, what with it being near the end of february and my just having finished the first one!

anyway, here it is, amy winehouse. anyone who recalls my original sketch may recognize a few changes i've made in doing this up all nicey-like. a few likeness points, such as the shapes of the nose and mouth and adding the pouchiness of her cheeks, which i somehow missed out on the first time around. but the biggest, most noticeable change is the tattoos. in my sketch, i made all her tattoos show drug- and alcohol-related images. doing up the finished version, i didn't feel good about making fun of her addictions, but i still didn't want to just copy them directly from reality. i wanted to make them funny. hope i was reasonably successful at that. anyway, here it is, and all comments and critiques are welcome and appreciated.

thanx!