Caricature Express

Art - a struggle? Why? It can be fun.

An artist from Rochester, Bippy Boyer, recently helped me to draw a complicated hat.
He simplified it into 3 strokes. Voila! I’m happy. When you know the answers, it’s no more struggle:

So tonight I tested it out. I drew the following hats that I found by surfing the web:

Success. Another skill under my belt. Thank You, Bippy.

Yesterday I was driving through Canarsie on my way to Park Slope. Took a break next to a vacant lot that had this wall around it. I was inspired by the real graffiti there:

I tried to make sense out of it - Just what did this kid do? I decided that he squashed the drunken-styled letters together, and added ‘graffiti-stuff’. I wish I had some photos of the big graffiti productions here to show you. I tried to turn this graffiti study into a production-type image:

Good - especially the Wesley one. But it was too tedious to help me represent this attitude (when appropriate) at Caricature Parties. So I went back to the original reference, copied it, and tried to apply That:

Maybe I’m just making up stories, but I wonder if Grafitti might be ‘ghetto’-art. Crowded conditions, not enough supplies so they had to squash their letters together on the paper….

It worked! Yesterday’s studying worked!

Here are some photos from last night. I applied yesterday’s studying - the couples were done with the amorphic shape principle. I also like the dark outline that I used to bring the two people together as ‘one’ shape:

We can compare them with some other pictures that I created recently - just about a week ago. I like these pictures too, but I prefer the new stuff that I did with amorphic shapes for couples. Here are last the pictures that I made before yesterday’s studying:

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To Hire this Artist:
(516) 579-4706
optidust@gmail.com

Once again, I’ve found that
you don’t know what you’re going to learn until
you go through the studying.

You don’t know what you’re going to experience until
you go there.

Art is Life.

Tonight I’ll be working at a Sweet 16 in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Sweet 16. What will that be like? I’ve worked at many Sweet 16’s.
From my experience, I’d say that That means
Couples.
Not my favoriate thing to do.

But there’s nothing like studying to make me look forward to the experience. Because if I study, I’ll be working out a problem, an idea. So I’ll look forward to using what I studied.

The first thing I did was to draw some couples directly. I wanted to remember to overlap them. And I decided that tonight, I’d either want them looking directly at me or both looking to the same side. Looking directly at me is the easiest for me - I don’t need much more than an oval with an X for a predraw:

I’ve been wanting to work on my 3/4 views for 3-dimensionality, so I practiced that too (more of a predraw - if I do it enough, I won’t need it so much):

Then I remembered something that I love to do. When it jumps out at me and I see how I can wrap thge 2nd person’s face in the leftover space of the first person. This is most likely to happen when someone has a very long thin face.

But I decided to just
make it happen for me.
By drawing the 2nd person as an amorphic shape:

Ick. Something I didn’t like about that.
So I decided to make then BOTH from amorphic shapes!
That came out real cool. Real ‘caricatureeeee’:

And I’m off! About to go have some fun at Alana’s Sweet 16.
Parties can be what we make them to be.
Life can be what we make it be.
Parties, Life, School, can be
fun, interesting, boring, scary, magical…..
We can choose to change our experience if we don’t like the one we’re in.

To Hire this Artist:
(516) 579-4706
optidust@gmail.com

I ate in a diner last night.
A person at a nearby table intrigued me.
Woman? Man dressed in drag, but very well done?
But this is the suburbs!

Well, this person had an absolute puff-ball area
around her small mouth - which was outlined
with dark lip-liner. And the bleached blonde hair.
Fur vest…..

So I drew her picture:

I wasn’t all that satisfied with my picture,
but I put it away to eat. Hey - this isn’t a commission -
why agonize? I was just biding my time, waiting for my dinner to be done.

But, me, I came home with the picture.
And once again, here I am at 2:30 am, trying
to make my Artwork
Better.

And look at what I made!!! It’s wonderful!!! :