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!).