Studio Caricatures

I thought for my first blog entry in over a year I would put some recent digital caricatures on here.

Dave Hartman (a friend of mine)


Michael Hansen (a friend of my friends)


Eric and Julia Pickerill (missionaries to Amsterdam)


Hopefully I will be more diligent to post new work as it comes. Thanks for checking in every now and then!

From June to July

It's been quite a shift in numbers since last month. The sales have finally picked up at Cedar Point, and it feels like it did a few years ago. Good times. But it leaves little time for good sketches.

However, I did manage to do these:













Jillian, my coworker, and her boyfriend (from photos):



Mark, Shannon, and Cassie, other coworkers:











Ryan, a coworker, and his friends from College of Creative Studies in Detroit:









It's only a few more weeks and the season is over. Hopefully there's a few more posts to come.

Back for More

A couple of sketches for all to see!

Crazy girl-demo day

Every now and then when it gets slow, we Cedar Point artists try to come up with a good "Demo challenge." These are practice drawings of real Cedar Point guests upon which we put extra requirements. One such challenge was a 3-minute color sketch. In another demo challenge we had to noticeably use the color Turquoise when coloring the face. These are just to see how well we can do it, and get better at thinking differently in the process.

This particular demo challenge was kind of exciting: Do the most exaggerated demo of a girl / female guest. Of course, likeness in my opinion is a huge barrier to extreme exaggeration, so it's a difficult thing to master.

Here are my entries:









Those are the only ones during which I took good photos. Here are some actual paying customers (sorry, no guest photos):









And some more demonstrations:







Here's a coworker, Dan Shoaf:

Cedar Point -- End of Month 1

Hey everybody. I could tell stories about customers and people at Cedar Point, but they would be no different than any other stories you might hear from other theme park artists. The stories never change.

Here are some sketches!

This one had some color-caking on the neck, due to my inexperience with creating colors for natural lighting. But the drawing was a good one.








And for all you Halo fans:



I'll hopefully get back on to update as soon as I get more batteries for my camera.

Cedar Point: Week One

Here are some of the highlights. I am one of the six returning (or veteran) caricature artists this year, along with Jon Lindberg (10th year), Emily White (6th year), Mark Magpusao (3rd year from San Jose), Alex Clare (3rd year), and my beloved Sarah Shepherd (6th year). This would have been my sixth year if I hadn’t taken last summer off to relax and build my own freelance business. The break was great, and I came back refreshed and ready for all the good times and bad times I would experience at Cedar Point.

In fact, when you’ve worked there for more than three years, you’ve pretty much seen it all. Father’s Day becomes the unofficial “gay day,” where any and all combinations of homosexual couples rally to come in and enjoy a completely non-discriminatory environment. On other occasions, and most often involving people from Detroit, irate customers gripe about their caricatures until they either get someone to re-draw it or get a complete refund of their money. High school kids think it’s funny to look at your nametag, and while walking past your stand at high speeds, yell out your name: “Hi, Joey!” They turn to each other and laugh hysterically.

I thought I had seen it all. Until last Friday, May 18, 2007.

Something was definitely happening in the park that day, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was. At first, I noticed an unbelievable amount of hairstyles that looked like this:



Then I noticed that all these hairstyles were being sported by young, possibly high school or college-age men, and all of a certain racial type for which I did not yet know the politically correct term. They certainly weren’t Hispanic, and they weren’t Indian. I immediately gave myself the mission to find out a)what the racial type was, b) what the hairstyle was called, c) what was the deal with all the [insert racial type]’s in the park today, and d) what is up with all the [hairstyles].



Within a few minutes I deduced that they were all from Detroit. I flagged down a couple of Detroiters who were possibly that racial type, but who didn’t have the aforementioned hairstyle. During our short conversation, through translation of Detroit-speak, I found out that the hairstyle was that of the children of John Gotti, an infamous Chaldean mobster. His kids are on an A&E reality show called "Growing up Gotti." The Chaldean racial type has some Italian, and mostly Arabic roots. The non-politically correct term, which was used often in my exchange, is “A-rab,” where the “A” is long. The reason they were all in the park was that it was “A-rab Skip Day,” a tradition dating all the way back to one week ago, during which all Chaldeans in Detroit city schools drive their parents’ Escalades to Cedar Point.



Within a few hours I found out through experience that Chaldeans from Detroit are incredibly rude, loud, inconsiderate of property and other people’s business, and consider themselves better than pretty much any other kind of people.

That has been the worst of it so far. I have done a few noteworthy sketches:

Last Day at Busch Gardens

This is a new post about an old subject.

I had a great time at Busch Gardens, and once I got back, I was overwhelmed with busy-ness to the point that I couldn't make my finishing remarks about the experience.



The days were long, but they went by quickly. In hindsight, I wish I could have really appreciated how fortunate I was to have been able to work with Joe Bluhm and Dion Socia for that short amount of time. When I came back to Cedar Point, the most impressive and envy-worthy part of my time in Tampa has been that fact alone.

I had an unforgettable time!

Here's a couple of sketches I whipped out that last day:



Who doesn't love a seven-person color sketch??