The Parhams go Toxic!

Let's take a few days off of the working out posts, okay? We'll get back to that in a few days. Right now, Barbie, Brady, and I are in Myrtle Beach, SC on a vacation with my family from upstate SC. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc., are all here from the Parham side of the family. They come every year, but I haven't been with them on this trip in oh, twenty five years or so.
Mom and Dad couldn't come up with us, so a big reason I'm posting these images is to catch them up on what's going on. Hey, guys! Miss you!

What's really cool is that this week coincided with our good friends and acapella stars Toxic Audio's (www.toxicaudio.com) run at the Myrtle Beach House of Blues. So, we got a lot of the family to go with us to one of their concerts. It was a great time, and they even pulled my grandmother on stage during one of the numbers. Here's a few pix from the night. The top is the whole gang with toxic, the middle one is me and my aunt (can you believe she's 50???), and the bottom one is Brady with her playmates, Jason and Julian James. We're having a blast.....

Working Out, Part3

Oh man, now THIS first picture is embarrassing. I must be about 17 here. Yikes. Look at that hair. This is back when people used to tell me I had "David Hasseloff hair". It was a "body wave", aka perm, that I got back in my senior year of high school. As if I wasn't enough of an outcast, having transferred to public school the year before, and quickly gaining a reputation as a complete non-partying teetotaler, the perm solution BURNT my skin, and left a huge, gaping, oozing sore on my forehead. Of course, all of the oh-so-understanding teenagers I went to school with said it was a "runaway zit". It seemed to last forever, but I guess it really didn't. There are no photos of me with it (thank God), only my scarred memories. I'm sure those must be Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, or something cheesey like that. Dig that 27 inch waist...I'd kill for that again! I have no idea what that "look" is on my face. Classic deer in the headlights, I think. Oh, yeah, you gotta love that wallpaper...

Anyway, it was about this time that I got out of my basement and started going other places to work out. One place was at my high school, in the football team's weight room. I was the only non football player who worked out there. We had a pretty scrawny team, so I was really one of the strongest guys there. Believe it or not.

I also started working out at a "real gym". The Greenville Athletic Club, it was called. It was dingy, smelly, and had lots of iron. No chromeplated machines, and very few women. All of the "cool guys" from my high school worked out there, so it kind of made me cool too, since I worked out with them. But not too cool. I was still the art guy who didn't party. But I did get some notoriety around the gym. Some older guys (at least 25 ...they were ancient!) even told me a few times what potential I had in bodybuilding. That just encouraged me more. I was sure I'd be Mr. Olympia in a few years. This was also the time when I first heard about steroids. I never knew they existed until then. I asked my uncles about this one guy who'd come into the gym (in striped spandex bike shorts...I still remember them!), and just go around posing in the mirrors, and talking to the few women who dared work out in the gym. He never worked out, it seemed, but he was HUGE! Plus, his skin was really, really red all of the time, and he had huge zits all over his back. All signs of steroid use, I learned from them. I promised myself right then that I'd never use them. Stay tuned, because this subject comes up again!

The second photo here was taken just yesterday. It's a photo of two of my most prized possessions, actually. These muscle mags are some of the only things my Dad has from when he was a kid (along with the 45s I mentioned yesterday)! He gave them to me when I started getting interested in working out. I was about the same age then that he was when he bought them. I've had them longer now than he did! They were a part of the "Joe Weider Muscle Building Club", where you got a membership card, etc. Unfortunately, he lost the card long ago.
I'd love to have it.

Working Out, part 2

Yep, I found the earliest photo I have of me from my beginning work out days. Don't laugh! Obviously, Schwarzenegger or Reeves I was NOT! This polaroid was in an old album that's taken me a few days to find. Took a lot of clean up in Photoshop to make the image even show up. It's really cool that I still have it, though.

Now where was I? Oh yeah, it's about 1981, and I'm fourteen years old. Like I said, I was getting Muscle and Fitness in the mail now. Funny, I just had a flashback to about that time... I still remember reading my uncles' copy of Schwarzenegger's autobiography, "Education of a Bodybuilder", while we were over at my Grandparents' home one Sunday afternoon after church. I was in the kitchen. Weird how you remember certain things, where you were, what you were doing....

Anyway, I somehow talked my parents into getting me a weight set. A Joe Weider bench, with the old cement filled weights. The only place I could fit the gym set was outside on the deck. I'd work out there, then cover it up with an old blue tarp when I was done. That's when this pic was taken. In the original photo, before I zoomed in to get this image, the tarp is visible, off to the right. I grew up in Greenville, SC, in the northwestern tip of that state. Asheville, NC, and the beginning of the what would lead into the Great Smokey Mountains, was less than an hour away. So, we did get mildly cold weather in the Fall and Winter, and even a few snow days most years (usually on my birthday). Mostly, it was kind of cold, gray, and rainy for most of the Winter.
So, the Weider set on the deck inevitably began to rust in a very short period of time. I moved it inside for a few months, into a corner of my bedroom. I'd lock the door and turn up the stereo as I worked out. I "rocked out" to Christian rock band PETRA, the American Graffiti soundtrack (50s Doo Wop), and to my Dad and Mom's old 45s of Elvis, Ricky Nelson, and early Beatles. I was a weird kid, I know. Remember, I was working out alone. No spot. That spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E when you're working out with free weights only, and don't know what you're doing. That's why, one night, I dropped 175 pounds on my nose while I was bench pressing. That was my max at the time, and after I did it once, the bar started coming down on me. I screamed for help, but with the blaring stereo, no one could hear me. I should've just tipped the bar to one side, but instead has the bright idea to let it fall BEHIND me. It's hard to think clearly in those situations. Well, the bar came down ON me...right on the bridge of my nose. I rolled it down, where it busted my lip, and then the adrenaline kicked in...I literally THREW it six or eight feet away, where it bounced off my bed.

That's when I graduated to the DP 1000, as I believe it was called. Sold by SEARS, it was a cable and weight stack based system. I didn't need a spotter. We assembled it in the moldy, partially finished basement. Actually, it was just a cement slab in the basement, surrounded by dirt. I only once remember an animal, a rat or something, being in there when I was. Well, maybe twice. I got to my "gym", rain or shine, by running outside and down the hill to the side of the house, since there was no inside entrance to the basement. Once there, I worked out by the single naked lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. I remember playing Rocky III's soundtrack ("Eye of the Tiger"), as I worked out and dreamed of being a pro bodybuilder....


To be continued...

Working out...

"The Path not taken". Man, I've had a lot of those in my forty years. Everyone has, I guess. Being artistic, and nonconformist, mine were always just a little bit "off the beaten path", I guess you could say. Model, actor, comic book artist, Elvis impersonator, I did them all. Did pretty well at them too, or at least showed some potential to do well. Then I finally settled on caricature artist. I've been very blessed with that. Now as I keep that going, I am transitioning more and more into "just a cartoonist". Everything I've done is just part of my lifelong goal to never have a "real job". Probably goes back to that Tshirt I had printed up back in the early '80s in Myrtle Beach, SC that said "Why Be Normal?".

But, about the above photo. It is my goofy attempt to put my head on, to those who recognize the photo, the body of the incomparable Steve Reeves. If you read the comments so far, my buddy Tom picked it out right away. Reeves played "Hercules" in all of the most famous sword and sandals epics of the early to late 50s. He was the most famous bodybuilder ever until Schwarzenegger, and, for a time, the biggest box office draw in the world. Even in these days of the HGH and anabolic steroid freaks that populate professional bodybuilding, to most purists of
the sport, Reeves is still one of the legends.

Which gets me back to the other path not taken. The one I haven't told you about yet. Yep, I wanted to be a professional bodybuilder. For those of you who've known me int he past ten, relatively couch potato years , as my wife and I have grown our business and our family, this may seem hard to believe. Almost as hard to believe as the Elvis impersonator thing. But, once upon a time, I was convinced I would be Mr. Olympia one day.

Don't laugh.


It all started with my uncles, I believe. Manuel and Daniel were and are my twin uncles, and they're only about six years older than me (Yeah, if you say them in the proper Southern drawl, their names rhyme. Cute.) They were kind of like my cooler, older brothers more than anything else. I idolized them, to a degree. When they started bodybuilding in the late 70's, I remember reading their Muscle and Fitness mags. Arnold was still competing. Manuel even went on and competed in a local contest. I know he didn't win, but I can't remember how he placed. About this time, they met a fellow young upstart who was also starting competitions...a man named Lee Haney, who eventually broke Arnold's Mr. Olympia titles.

Anyway, I subscribed to Muscle and Fitness myself at the age of fourteen, and started working out in our basement. This was the time of Mohammed Makkaway, Samir Bannout, and Bob Paris. Frank Zane was still winning, and Boyer Coe was still competing. It was a great time for bodybuilding. The last years before the freaks took over.


To be continued....

Cocoa Travel Sketches, part2

Here's another sketch from our beach trip last week. I had a lot of fun drawing this "beach beauty" as she walked briskly down the beach. I like sketching quickly, trying to catch the person's essence as they go by. The lines I could do, the weight of the figure (literally) I could play around with, made this one fun. I also LOVE gray chartpaks and black prismacolor, and used them on all of my beach sketches.

Big gig

Here's a shot from a biglive gig I did yesterday morning. All of the artists work for my wife and I at our retail locations. A great group of talented folks.

Gigs like this are a lot of fun. It was perhaps our biggest ever...20 artists! I really enjoyed the meal at the Golden Corral buffet afterwards, as well. About 13 of us went to that. We talked, ate, and sketched.

Anyway, it was like a mini caricature convention or something. Good times, good times.

Ripped Off

Well, this one takes the cake. I've had guests tell me they saw my caricatures on display on other artists' stands, I've seen photos of my oldest daughter, from my how to draw caricatures book, on other artists' displays, and good buddy Tom Richmond even saw a pic OF me by the legendary Belgian caricaturist Jan Opdebeeck on a display up in NYC. Yeah, you read that right...it was MY face on the display.

Then there was the time that a fellow NCN (National Caricaturists Network) member copied all of the "keywords" on my homepage and put them on his homepage (even right down to my company name, and the name of my wife and daughter).

BUT, awhile back I got an email from someone in Russia, who informed me of perhaps the weirdest ripoff of my stuff yet. Look at this site:

http://art-vip.ru/

Then, go to my company site:

www.caricatureconnection.com

See any similarities? Yep, ripped off the ENTIRE look of my site. The colors, the buttons, up till recently, he even had the cartoon version of my wife on the "contact us" link. All the art elsewhere is his (please don't think it's mine!), at least.

But isn't that just wierd? I did send him and the "designers" of his site an email asking them to come up with an original idea of their own, not just rip off mine, but alas, I never got a reply. They did recently take down the cartoon I did of my wife for the "contact us" button (and whatever that translates to in Russian), though.

Travel Sketches

Well, our annual trip to our timeshare in Cocoa Beach is now over. Back home, settling into the daily grind again. Which, when you draw for a living, ain't too bad. Matter of fact, since this was the first year we had two kids (baby Kaley is ten months old), Barbie and I are in dire need of a vacation now, after our so called vacation. Cocoa is only an hour away, so we come home in the middle of the week every year to catch up on biz, and then go back down for the rest of the week.
So, really, it ain't much in the way of a vacation. But, it does allow us to recharge our batteries a little bit. Usually. This year there was lots of artist "emergencies" at our retail stands, and, of course, dealing with the aforementioned baby factor.

Anyway, I know some artists who are adamant about NOT drawing when they travel. They figure they do it all the time, so they want to take a vacation from that as well. I can understand that, but I personally feel that a "vacation" is the only time when I can draw what I want to draw. I spend everyday drawing what other people want me to draw, so when I'm traveling I draw ONLY what I want. I didn't get much drawn this year, but I did do a few. Here's one. I saw a kid like this on the beach, and then my friend Steve Silver's trick of "frankenstein-ing" him with some other people I saw. The shorts came from someone, the boogieboard is actually mine, etc., etc. So, it's kind of "lifedrawing", kind of not. I liked how it turned out for a quickie.

New website design!

It's finally here...the new design of my webpage. I needed a place I could send people to see my personal work, away from Caricature Connection, the type of character design and illustration stuff I've been doing for clients and magazines for the past two years or so, and the kind I want to do more and more of. Thomas Florimonte, a great friend of mine and one of the founders of www.ka-blam.com , is the amazing webdesigner who's services I hired to do all of this over the past few months. He, and the site, far exceeded my expectations. Browse around!

NCS!

This weekend is the National Cartoonists Society annual bash. This year it's at the Ritz Carlton here in Orlando. The NCS is an elite society of cartoonists, membership by invitation only, (I feel really blessed to be in it), and our bashes are quite the swanky affair. Not exactly like the Polynesian shirts and flip flops attire of the NCN, which I am more familiar with. This is Tuxes and gowns only. This year I broke down and bought a tux..not sure how often I'll get to wear it, so we'll have to see how good an investment it turns out to be. Anyway.... here I am in my monkeysuit, with my always gorgeous wife, Barbie. The crazy guy between us is Sam Viviano, art director of MAD magazine. We've had a lot of fun this weekend hanging out with him and our good friends the Richmonds, the Steckleys, and the Silvers. We've also met a lot of other great cartoonists whose strips I've always admired, and some I've never heard of before, that I'm now fans of.

The second pic here is of me and Steve Silver at the opening party Friday night (thanks to Tom Richmond for the photo). No, we didn't coordinate our oufits, black shirt and khakis, ahead of time. Demented minds think alike, I guess...

My buddy Tom Richmond was up for a couple of Reuben awards (the NCS' version of the Oscars), and won one of them, for Advertising Illustration. The third pic's of me and Ed Steckley with Tom after his win. Ed and I figured it was the closest we'd be to a Reuben for awhile....

Congrats, Tom! You deserve it , man!

Storked!

More character design work. They wanted a drunken stork, and they wanting him to be reclining back a bit, so he could be leaning on something. Man, I love doing this kind of stuff!

The really interesting thing here is that I did a lot of the research, mental work, and sketching on this guy probably two years ago, for another client. How so? Well, that client wanted me to update a badly drawn character he had, named "Storko", for a line of baby's clothes, I believe. Yeah, I know, real creative name. Unfortunately, I underquoted the job a bit, because at the time I was wanting more character design work, and it seemed like a quick, easy one to do.

Long story short, the guy turned out to be rude, hard to work with, and kept wanting knitpicky revisions on the sketches. He landed up trying to "renegotiate" on the fee we'd already agreed to (which was, again, lower than it should've been). I always get a credit card upfront, but since we were only in the sketch stage, I didn't even charge him. Frankly, I didn't care. I was just ready to be done with him! I've never done this before and wouldn't again. I'd charge his card regardless.

Fast forward to now, (when I do much more of this character design stuff) and THIS job comes in. I quickly resurrected my "Storko" sketches and my reference photos from google, and took off. This guy came out perfect the first time I drew him. The client loved him, paid well, and everyone's happy.

The moral? Keep those old sketches, people! You never know when you'll get to use them. Sometimes old jobs aren't really dead- they can come back to life in another form!

The other moral? Don't work for anyone who wants you to redesign their "Storko" character.

Hey hey, we're the.....

Yep, still slammed around here. Thought I'd share the latest piece for a client. This is for a landscaping company. They're gonna put it on their trucks, shirts, etc., etc. Was a lot of fun to do. Particularly like the crazy monkey on the far right of the piece.

I love drawing monkeys.

Yellow Page Guy!

Here's another new client. Has a biz selling yellowpage ads to people. Wanted his head on a phonebook.

LiveDraws- Hit and Runs

Here's some recent live work again. I have done quite a few tradeshows lately. Clients have been great (two of them tipped me really good), people have loved the drawings. When I have an empty chair for a few moments, though, I have been sketching people at a distance, or at other booths, unbeknowst to them. Then, I'll go over and give them their pic that they haven't even known they were posing for! I call them "Hit and runs". It's a lot of fun for them and me. Plus, the client loves it! I figure I'm being paid to draw, I tell them, so that's what I'm going to do ... no matter what!

"Hit and runs", though, are pretty difficult. For one thing, you have to be fast. People are NOT posing! Also, you get interesting views, gestures, and expressions. As an artist, you get out of your "comfort zone" really quickly doing this. You have to draw people in profile, facing the "wrong" way, in motion, in complicated poses, etc, etc. They really force you to build up your visual library. Here's a few "Hit and Runs" from the past few days...

New Client

This is for a great new client of mine. She has a company that empowers women to purchase their own cars. She wanted something cute, sexy, with a sassy look. I drew her completely on the Wacom (the car was still on paper and scanned in, though). Yep, starting to get more comfortable with that. I hope to soon be paperless all the time!

Livedraws

Here's some more recent live drawings from gigs. I'm really studying Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace) lately, adding him to my usual studies of Hirschfeld and the like. Really studying postures, and clothing folds, etc.

Neat Handwriting pays off

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a really nice lady. Seems she and her kids had been drawn a few weeks ago at a gig at Disney, but her husband didn't sit for his caricature and later decided he wished he had. I was the only artist at the event (like usual). So, the next day, they went to MGM and got him drawn at the retail stands. They hated it!

Well, when they got back home, they somehow tracked me down. They've now commissioned me to do a caricature of the husband/Dad. At first I thought Disney had just given her my business email (www.caricatureconnection.com). Then I realized she had written me at my PERSONAL email. Curious, I asked her how she'd found me. Seems she'd read my signature on the pics I'd done for her and the kids, and GOOGLED my name. She'd shot photos of me drawing the kids, so that also helped her, since I seem to pop up on GOOGLE an annoying amount of times. What's really amazing here is that I usually have REALLY crappy handwriting. Just ask my eight year old, who's always buggin me about it. But, I guess I've learned my lesson. I never would've gotten this job if she hadn't been able to read my signature.
Thank God this night I wrote legibly. Good, clear handwriting can be a real sales tool in and of it's own. Particularly when you have a weird name like mine.

Here's the photos she sent of that gig:

Shark Divin'

Months ago, me and my honey went to one of these charity benefit dinners we try to go to a couple of times per year, and we bid on a few things in the silent auction. Barbie begged me to let her bid on the "Shark Dive" package from Sea World, knowing that I would be reluctant to go with her, since I'm a big wuss. She assured me "We probably won't win, and besides, it's for charity...".

Yeah, well, we WON.

Figures.

Anyway, yesterday was the day. I tried not to think about it (remember, I'm a wuss), and just accepted my fate. I'm glad I did. We had an amazing time. Toured through the park, Barbie rode The Kraken (again... Me=Wuss), and even saw a couple of caricaturist friends (hi, Maria!).

The Shark Dive, by the way, was WAY cool, but the time with "my girl" was WAY cooler. Thirteen and a half years, and going stronger than ever. God is good.

More Recent Live ones

Man, I know the photos of these bite, coming from my digital cam, but I adjusted the levels as much as I possibly could. Plus, added those nifty color backgrounds on a few, to try and help make up for the fuzziness.

Hope ya see something ya like...

New Live Gig pics

I've been working a lot of gigs lately, so here's some pics from them that I liked. Sorry about the weird colors...my light on my easel casts a yellow tint to everything, and then I have to try to color correct it all in photoshop when I download from the camera. I don't draw on blue or gray paper or anything...but I DO shade in with gray markers. Interesting, as I post these, I notice they're in three distinctly different styles, yet were all done the same week. The guy sitting, and the coffee guy were from the same gig, even. I tend to do that...switching styles rapidly, depending on the face. It's something my buddy, Joe Bluhm, and I used to do when we worked gigs together back in the good old days..whatever style we thought we could best "capture" the person in, that's the style we used. Really kept us on our toes, so we didn't fall into "generics"....

Old Man Winter

Yeah, yeah, I know most of the US would LOVE to have 51 degrees and sunshine in the afternoon right now, but to us Floridians, it's FREAKIN' COLD!!!! So, in honor of that, I went and found this piece I did for a client back in December. Wanted to post it then, but was too slammed at the time (that's also why there were few if any updates here for a few months!). Anyway, here's "Old MAn Winter".....

Lunartics!

Once upon a time, my wife and I, and good buddy Ted Tucker, self published a comic book named "Lunar Donut". We learned a lot on that book, and were doing pretty well with it, getting fairly well known in the small press comics industry. As "known" as you could back then, in that industry, anyway. Life and the caricature business got too busy to continue publishing it, though. My how to draw Caricatures book is published through the Lunar Donut Press imprint so it's not really dead, after all, I guess. We might even resurrect the comics someday again, you never know.

Anyway, while Barbie and I were going through photo albums last night, we found this old publicity shot for Lunar Donut, that we used to run in the inside cover of the issues. This was about eleven years ago, to my reckoning. We thought you all might want to see it:

Stripes Guy

Another one from a recent live event. This guy was a lot of fun to draw and talk with. He got drawn by all three artists at the event, I believe. We call that being a "collector".

I like drawing stripes and patterns. Now, I personally, don't wear HORIZONTAL stripes.....

Brady's 1st Gig

Well, we all knew it was going to happen. Just HOW SOON we didn't know! The other night at my 40th birthday get together, we mentioned to my eight year old daughter Brady how, since there were no other kids, she coudl set up and draw caricatures if she wanted...even put out a tip jar! Her eyes got big as saucers, and she ran over to the easel we had set up. She didnt' stop for hours! Here's a shot of her at work.

Oh yeah...the tips? She made $70!!!!

Let's Toon!

Yeah, I changed the name of my blog. So?

I figured I'd try this one out for awhile....

That's an artist for ya, always changin' stuff, never satisfied...

Earring guy LIVE

So, now that the Bday is over, it's time to get back to some artwork. This was from a live gig a month or two ago. Another in my newer, "non-balloon head" style.

Yum...

German Chocolate Birthday cake rocks.....

40!

Well, it's my birthday today, the big 4-0. Yikes. Birthdays usually never phase me, but this one seems momentous, for some reason. I know it shouldn't, it's just a number. "You're only as old as you feel", yada yada yada....I know that. Plus, to be honest, I feel better than I have in years. So, it's all good.

Still SOUNDS pretty old, though.

I may be getting older, but I refuse to get OLD! I am a very blessed man with a beautiful wife I love more than ever, and two sweet, beautiful daughters.

This weekend my lovely bride threw me a party here at the house with a few friends over for poker, pool, and a little karaoke. It was a great time. Here's a pic of us being serenaded by Jeremy and Shalisa James, close friends and famous acapella singers (ToxicAudio.com....check em out!).