Sunday, November 23, 2008

Valleyfair exaggeration exstravaganza!!







It's been a while since summer ended, but I thought I would share some caricatures I drew out at Valleyfair. It was my second summer at the concession job, and I've seen a lot of improvement in my drawings, likenesses, exaggerations, and airbrushing. I suppose drawing for 10-12 hours a day all summer will do that. One of the things about drawing at an amusement park is that its very easy to get bored, and your drawings can become stagnant and generic. The best way for me to combat this is really pushing my exaggerations. When you really nail a customer, its a great feeling. A lot of the time, customers will have a preconception about what the drawing is going to look like ie. not making them hideous monstrosities. Most of the time they just want a cute drawing. Not only is that insanely boring, but it'll rarely turn out as a good caricature. If a customer sits down for me and they specifically ask to be drawn cute, or ask me not to go to town on their ears/guady teeth/lazy eye/ what have you, what I really hear is draw me as ugly as you can. That keeps the job real interesting. Getting drawings returned is not uncommon for caricature artists that really like to exaggerate. It's somewhat of a right of passage. Anyway, I took my camera to work one day to snap some pictures. These were a couple that I thought turned out pretty good. The bottom drawing is a self caricature that we hang at the booths. I'm not sure what inspired my 300 lb. figure, I think it was the funnel cake stand right next to our booth. BTW, if you can eat a whole funnel cake and not feel like death afterwards, you are my hero.

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