M&Mcatures

One of the gigs I did last week was for the MARS candy company, drawing people as M&Ms. I worked for them for two days. On the first night, it was in between two other "normal" caricature gigs the same day. That was the toughest day of the gig. Obviously, M&Ms are round so we had three shapes we could pick from- completely round, oval, big at the bottom, or oval, big at the top. Not a lot of variety for our face shapes. Then, M&Ms also HAVE NO NOSES. AARRGGHHH!!! For some faces, this works fine. The nose is a subordinate detail anyway on them, so they don't need the nsoe to make the likeness. But for other faces, YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED THE NOSE. Man, there was this one guy with a HUGE honker of a nose, and I had such a hard time resisting drawing it. My likeness, without it, really sucked. If I'd had his nose in the pic, though, it would've been dead on. Oh well.

The second day of this gig, I started adding props to people, and a bit of background. I hadn't done that the first night. This made the gig go so much quicker. That first night, with no props, just big round noseless heads over and over.......

BORING.

But by this day, I was feeling a bit more inspired. Probably the sleep the night before had helped as well. Three gigs in one day that previous day made me pretty tired.

A fisherman. Duh.

A Karate M&M. The model was a nice guy who coulda kicked my butt in about two seconds, I'd guess. He's a black belt in a bunch of things.

I liked the likeness pretty well on both of these, actually. CONSIDERING the obvious limitations inherent in the style. I kept that official M&M cheat sheet above my paper, to keep me more "on model", and to remind myself not to draw noses!

All in all, it was a great gig. Great client, great fellow artists I worked with, great crowd of people.

Plus, we got lots of candy, so we're all stocked up for Halloween around here! BONUS!