Life of a portrait artist...

I have a few pet peaves when it comes to sketching portraits from life.  Don't get me wrong, I love drawing people and chit chatting as I draw them.  For some reason total strangers will totally open up to me about their personal lives, and we become friends for that short period of time.  One thing however that really bugs me is bad manners.  Most of the time I can look past it, but yesterday really got my goat.  I was drawing singles of these 5 little kids.  They were beautiful children.  It was rather early in the morning so they were bleary eyed and sun burned from spending the day before in the pool.  Some fool put a food vending machine in my art room, and all 5 kids were able to convince grandma to buy them some goodies.  They cuddled up behind me, pulling their chairs close enough that eventually one little guy was pressing up against me.  All of them noisily munched on their chips with their mouths open, sucking their fingers loudly and groaning in delight.  Chip dust was flying, and I have a feeling that I got some in my hair!  I did ask them to scoot back a little, which they did for a few seconds, but then I figured that they were enjoying themselves so much that I would just bite my tongue and get the sketching over with as quickly as possible.  I can draw pretty fast when I want to with out altering the quality of my work, and so I cranked out those sketches in less than 5 minutes each.  "My goodness", grandma said, "you sure draw fast!" 

 Illustration from Page 19 "And Candy Smiled" by Carole Sarkan.

I drew this cutie pie yesterday.  My frontal caricatures are still quite rough, but I feel them improving.  I feel confident that with in a few months I should be strong enough to do them for a full 8 hours at a time.  Its strange that drawing portraits is so much more exhausting for me than drawing caricatures.  (oh and just for the record, anyone's image that I post in my blog has given me permission to do so.  If the image is of a minor, I have permission from their parent.  I will never post an image of someone with out prior concent.)

a link to my web site where you can see examples of my paintings.

Check out a web site to see examples of my paintings

emilychristoff.com

A Portrait artist "Re-learning" caricatures.

About 6 months ago I decided to start drawing caricatures again.  I have been wanting to do this for a very very long time, but for one reason or another I just never got around to it again.  I used to love doing them, and made a ton of money doing so, but when I married my first husband, AKA "Ed the Caricature God", I stopped drawing them and focused on my portraits so that he could do his thing when we were sketching together at shows.  Its been at least 15 years I think since I last sat down at an easel for any amount of time to do "funny pitchers" for the general public.

Last winter I decided that the best way to get back into it was to start with profile caricatures, using pastel.  It was an easy step to do this since I have never stopped doing profile pastel portraits.  For a week or so I just did free demos of co-workers.  They were pretty lame, but it was a start.  Now, after doing them for a few months I am really comfortable with them and actually do one now and then that really rocks.  This is an example of one that I did just last week.  They take about 7 - 10 minutes per person.

Recently I decided that I was going to graduate to drawing frontals again.  It was now or never.  I am NOT getting any younger!  A frontal caricature is TOTALLY different than drawing a profile portrait, or even a frontal portrait.  I drew around 25 or 30 of them today.  I will post a few of them later in the week.

The quality of a quick sketch artist's work is very closely linked to their self confidence as an artist and performer.  Hopefully my confidence will return soon as a caricature artist.