More Gift Caricatures

 One More for the Road!

This was a fun one and done as part of a diptych. 

The lead AA of a medical firm's finance department commissioned me to draw two sets of gift caricatures. One for the executives celebrating the retirement of the chief financial officer. I drew the three of them hoisting him on their shoulders with the keys to his favorite car, a 1967 Pontiac GTO. That one was a more rendered piece but unfortunately the execs didn't give me permission to post it but I was assured by the client that they loved it. 

The one posted above is for the lead administrative assistant and the other financial officers of the department. Basically they're jacking the retiring CFO's wheels. Rumor has it he has dozens of them stashed in a secret underground location, not unlike Jay Leno.


Ahh......The Great Outdoors.

A very challenging one. Not unlike the 5ver I did for the sales director at Kraft. The art director for a brand identity strategy/design firm in Northbrook, IL commissioned this piece as a big sendoff for one of his team members; the lead lady in the boat holding her Excellence Award. He wanted it to be similar to the Mort Drucker cartoons he saw in the many issues of Mad Magazine he's collected over the years, hence the grayscale shaded look. This piece holds the record for the most people. The number of people was originally set for 24 or so but it quickly ballooned to about 37. Feel free to count the figures at your leisure.

As always the client supplies the photos and other reference. As is inevitable with multi-people projects like this not all photos are usable due to pixelization issues, bad lighting, etc. thus re-sends are necessary(luckily only four or so pix fell into that category). Nor did they all come in at once which was actually a relief since it gave me time to really focus on the details of smaller groups of subjects at specific moments during the process of drawing. As a result the original pencil sketch changed a bit but the main gist of the composition remained the same. Unfortunately given the relatively short deadline and the increased number of people I had no time to set the type for the banner as originally planned but the art director was kind enough to strip in the text to his specifications.

Ultimately things worked out and all parties involved were pleased and I finally got a chance to indulge in REM sleep again.

For The Holidaze.....

An example of quick repurposing.

This was a gift caricature of a client who hired me for a two day medical convention. I never got a chance to draw her at the convention so I agreed to do the gift caricature gratis from photographs she  provided. After approval from a sketch I started work....on other freelance gigs that slowed my progress on her gift caricature. Long story short by the time I was able to finish the piece it was waaaay past Thanksgiving. Changes needed to be made and by mid December I emailed her the finished piece seen above along with...........

...............this one!

I never got any feedback from her but there's an old truism in advertising that says if you don't hear anything from the client then that's a good thing and you're good to go. Plus my client has a very busy schedule so I moved on.

Two years pass and I'm hired for her company's convention for this year (its a bi-annual event by the way). Then I discover that she never got the caricatures. Needless to say I was floored but very apologetic. Lucky for me she wasn't upset despite the time that passed. I guess I was so swamped with work at the time that I simply thought I sent the work. I was able to draw her and her fellow co-workers this time around at the convention but made sure to send her the digi caricatures. She loved them both and I was able to start breathing again. Somewhere in this story there's a lesson but I'll leave that for smarter readers to ferret out.

Happy Holidaze and all that jazz everyone.

A Few Black & White Boards

Some Full Color Advertising Boards

Movie Boards

These boards were done a few years ago when the Johnny Depp movie Public Enemies was being filmed here in Chicago. In the interest of disclosure they were done for a private client who was vying for a consultant's position with the director Michael Mann, which he got by the way.

At the time of the filming these scenes weren't planned out yet but Mann liked the drawings so much that they wound up being used as the basis for the final sequence in the movie. I was never on set but simply worked from a general description of the historical reportage of how Dillinger bought the farm just a few doors down from the Biograph Theater. The final filmed version was if course much slicker than my scrawlings with a couple of extra details added but it was still great seeing a wee bit of my "influence" in the sequence. Later I wound up doing a portrait of the client in full gangster regalia. To be posted later.

Some Gift Caricatures

This was an interesting and challenging project. A marketing director at Kraft Foods wanted this set of five gift caricatures to celebrate the successes of the various sales teams in Illinois and Texas. If memory serves one of the teams came from a third state in the mid-west but I can't remember which one.  

Each piece measured roughly 22x27 or so inches at hi res. Maybe around 450dpi. I had barely 4 or 5 days to get it done. Capturing the likenesses, juggling reference for the backgrounds and setting text pushed me to the limits of lack of sleep (I had to juggle this with another project) but the final results were well worth it. Gift caricature requests aren't usually this involved, clients often request one or two full illustrations max, but its nice to have a project that breaks the mode. More to be posted later.

 A few frames.....

Moody Speed Sketch

Finally out of the gate. My first blog picture post. An early experimentation with the acrylic brushes in Painter 4 initially, then "finished" up in Painter 9.5.





Sci-Fi Designs

Super Hero Designs

It had been a while since I'd done miscellaneous hero designs. One day I'll get around to coloring them.