other people who also ace faces

over the last five or six years, i've been a regular poster on several caricaturist message boards. some of them are now extinct, but a couple (most notably the drawing board and e-caricatures) are still going strong. one of things we often do on these boards is post our own photos so we can draw caricatures of each other. i thought i'd post on here (since i haven't had much time for new artwork lately) some of my favourites of the ones i've drawn over the years. some of these are several years old, some rather more recent; some are digital, some are pencil-on-paper; and some clearly have more time and effort put into them than others. nothing personal.

hope you like them.

alison (i don't know her last name):



ewan mactavish (sorry if i've spelled the name wrong):


chris marie (all the reference photos she posted showed her in low-cut shirts):


a guy who posts under the screen name maester:


a guy who posts under the screen name stilltoon:


william appledorn:


sagan lacey:


chris neuenschwander:


gord macdonald:


juanjo baron:


kaya (i don't know her last name either-- i thought this looked like her, but i'm not sure she agreed. maybe if i were to meet her face-to-face i'd draw her differently):


chris wahl (who drew my favourite of all the ones that have been done of me):


mike hasson:


a guy who posts (or used to) under the name neo noaide:


simon, whose last name i don't remember:


frank zieglar:

people are actually following me!

look at that, i officially have one quarter of a hundred "followers" on the cartoonatorium! woo-hoo! thanks to those who have signed up, and for those who haven't.... it's easy! go ahead, try it!

sorry there hasn't been any artwork posted in a few weeks. busy busy busy. soon, hopefully.

thanks again!

oh yeah, so...

here are the identities of the people in my previous post, for anyone who couldn't tell, and cared:

marty feldman
bruce lee
jeff probst
billy joel
nancy grace
marc singer
anthony stewart head
billy bob thornton
kristen schall
gwen stefani.

bunch of pencil (tool) sketches

hey. been back to work at an animation studio since late august, after an eight-month layoff. more than the work, what i really missed was getting my lunch breaks to do some celebrity caricatures in sketchbook pro. so i've been doing some here and there wherever i can get time. for no apparent reason, i decided with these ones to (1) do them all using only the pencil tool, and (2) hold onto them until i had a big batch i could post all at once. so here they are. they range, in terms of their degrees of fame, from pretty obscure to famous enough that they should be easily recognizable if i've done them right. so see if you can tell who they are. if anyone can guess all ten of them... well, there's no prize, but i'll be fairly impressed, i promise.

it seems she kised this girl, right? and then, uh... yeah, i guess she liked it or something.

a very quick (as i'm sure you can tell) katy perry for this month's contest at e-carictures.

sing along if you know the words: baaaarrrrrump dumpdaadump, badump, daadump, barrump dumpdaadump, badump, daadump...

alfred hitchcock, for the e-caricatures monthly contest. i was trying really hard to find different things to exaggerate than every other caricature i've seen of him... it didn't work. so i threw in the blood spatter just to try to make it different. looking at it again, though, i'm not sure i like it. it's kinda distracting. oh, well. it's just a sketch. i think i might like to take this one further one day, and if i do, i'll decide then what to do with it to separate it from the others.

very witty, wilde. very witty.

i noticed that i'd gotten the nose all wrong on my original sketch for this one, so i changed that in the final drawring. other than that, it's largely the same. i didn't really want the textured paper, but it was the only thing i could find at the art supply store that was the colour i wanted, so i went with it. in the end, i quite liked the effect it gave. all comments welcome.

it's oscar wilde, by the way.

here's tonight's "word": charracctuaterturre.

here's the next one: jon stewart and stephen colbert. pardon the seam. my scanner's not big enough for me to scan these in one piece, so i have to patch the halves together in photoshop, and for some reason, i couldn't get the halves to blend together on this one. i'll have to see what i can do about that. when i'm a billionaire, i'll get me one o' them big scanners, and never have problems like this again. also, i'll have my servants do the scanning for me.

so, apparently there are these people who study these things called "oceans"...

i have this ongoing thingy-thing with the oceanography department of halifax's dalhousie university: they have a decades-old tradition of honouring students who are defending their theses with caricatures of themselves. the backgrounds of these caricatures are generally full of details and visual puns referring to the topic of the thesis in question. they've had several different artists over the years doing them, and i'm the current one (since late 2008, if i remember correctly). i don't claim to understand any of the visuals. i just draw what they tell me to draw. don't try to "get" these. you'll hurt yourself. but here are just a few of my particular favourites:

warning: disturbing image. but look at it anyway.

here's another finished one: frank zappa. i originally had something much different in mind for this, but when i sat down to start it, i realized i didn't have it fully conceived in my mind, and couldn't seem to visualize exactly where i was going to go with it, so i abandoned that idea and went with this one. anyone who doesn't understand this image, check out this zappa album cover:[url]http://intergalacticfunhouse.com/Weasels_Ripped_My_Flesh.jpg[/url].

comments, as always, welcome.

lady? by what definition?

normally, i don't like caricaturing flash-in-the-pan flavours-of-the-month who will be nothing but punchlines in five or ten years, if, indeed, anyone remembers them at all, but this one is the subject of this month's contest at e-caricatures. so... i did.

it's lady gaga.

more people you don't recognize.

just a couple more of the non-celebrity commissions i've done recently, with which i was particularly pleased.

insert political joke here. i have none.

i very seldom caricature political figures, for two reasons: 1. politics bore me. 2. they're so frequently done that i don't see much point in adding another one to the pile, being unable to really bring anything new to them.

but, for some reason, i felt i should have one or two for my sample book at my stand down at the local waterfront, so i did these up. comments welcome.

weird-lookin' chick with a funny name.

Finally! another one! i was originally planning to do these in the alphabetical order i did the original sketches in, but then... i didn't.

didn't change much, if anything, from the original sketch for this one. people seemed to like the sketch. hope you like the final as well. comments welcome.

uma thurman:

sketchy types.

i haven't been posting much new work lately, because i've been very busy with commissions and this temp job i've been at to help fill time between animation contracts. but every now and then, over the last couple of months, i've been taking ten or fifteen minutes to whip up some caricature sketches. i've been trying to go for celebrities of whom i've seldom, if ever, seen caricatured. i guess mainly because they're not exactly yer a-listers. all comments welcome and appreciated.
comedian brian regan:

cat deeley:

harry connick, jr.:

howie mandel:

folk-rock singer-songwriter josh ritter. again, this guy's not hugely famous, but he's become one of my all-time favourites. i highly recommend him to anyone who likes... say, bob dylan or cat stevens:

kyra sedgwick:

and nathan fillion:

how does a treasure troll get to such a position of power?

sorry posts have been so few and, as they say, far between of late. been very busy.
i very seldom draw political caricatures, but this guy was the subject of the monthly contest at e-caricatures, and i've never been one to pass up the chance to caricature a crazy, evil, bomb-weilding dwarf.

kim jong il:

we got a bogey at 12:00!

the latest caricature contest over at the e-caricatures forum is humphrey bogart. i hoped i might have time to do more than just a quick, rough sketch, but it doesn't look like i'm going to. so here's what i've got. i was trying to exaggerate him differently from what anyone else has done without losing the likeness. whether i was successful in that or not, i leave up to you to decide.

some flights of some conchords

wow, this one a month idea is really not panning out, is it? over halfway through april, here, finally, is post #2: flight of the conchords.

those of you (if there are any) who remember my sketch of these guys from the a to zed thread may recall that the pose was very static and dull. i wanted the final to be something funny, what with them being comedians and all. my original thought was to draw them as the two-headed creature from mel's drawring (fans of the show will know what i'm talking about). but i couldn't find any good reference for that image, so i had to come up with another gag. this was it. people more versed in drawring the human form will doubtless find myriad inaccuracies to pick apart here, and feel free to if you wish, but just know that... well, i don't care. i didn't want to put too much time or effort into anatomical accuracy, i just wanted it to be funny. hope you like it. let me know what you think.

world's handsomest caricaturist. as far as i know.

the main reason i haven't been posting much lately is because, being between animation jobs, i'm using most of my time working on five or six different projects that i never have time to do when i'm working. one of the main things is creating 9with a lot of help from a good friend of mine who does this stuff professionally) a whole new caricatures by don website! i'm excited about it and hope you'll like it. in connection with this, i felt i needed to do a new self-caricature to grace the front page. this is it.

hey, that's not a caricature!

i know, i haven't been posting much here so far this year. been busy with several projects i'm trying to finish before work in animation starts up again. including putting together a whole new caricatures by don website! so that's something for all you huge, rabid fans of mine (donheads, as i understand you like to be called) to look forward to.

in the meantime, speaking of animation, i thought i'd take this opportunity to show you what else i do besides caricatures. this is my animation demo reel, made up of flash animation scenes i did while working at the now-defunct (what a great word!) collideascope animation. it has scenes from the shows "olliver's adventures" and "delilah & julius", as well as my contribution to an experimental project done for cbc's "zed tv", called "exquisite bunny". the reel is a little out of date, since i've worked on several shows since then, but until i'm able to work any scenes from those shows in, this is my demo as it exists.

the music, by the way, is "weird al" yankovic's "fun zone", from the movie "uhf".

enjoy.

can you believe she's still alive?

i think i've mentioned somewhere around here that my intention for 2009 was to take 12 of my unfinished sketches from the "a to zed" project of 2008, (for newcomers to this not-blog who aren't familiar with the a to zed project, search "a to zed" in the top left corner of this page) and finish up one a month, in traditional media (mostly coloured pencil). well, i don't know that the one-a-month plan is really gonna pan out now, what with it being near the end of february and my just having finished the first one!

anyway, here it is, amy winehouse. anyone who recalls my original sketch may recognize a few changes i've made in doing this up all nicey-like. a few likeness points, such as the shapes of the nose and mouth and adding the pouchiness of her cheeks, which i somehow missed out on the first time around. but the biggest, most noticeable change is the tattoos. in my sketch, i made all her tattoos show drug- and alcohol-related images. doing up the finished version, i didn't feel good about making fun of her addictions, but i still didn't want to just copy them directly from reality. i wanted to make them funny. hope i was reasonably successful at that. anyway, here it is, and all comments and critiques are welcome and appreciated.

thanx!

that guy again.

i'm not posting as often these days as i was for a while there. been very busy, with a lot of different things. found a bit of time over the last few days to do up this one. david bowie, one of my all-time favourite singers, and all-time favourite caricature subjects. this one might be done now, but i'm open to suggestions if anyone thinks there's anything i could do to make it more effective.

enjoy.

a few "real" people.

i don't usually post my non-celebrity work, just because i don't figure people who don't know the people i've drawn won't be very ineterested. but i thought, just to give the general public an idea of the kind of work you could expect were you to hire me, i thought i'd post a few samples. some of these are friends and family, some are previous clients.

enjoy.

she had me at "goodbye".

all right, here it is! the final post on the "a to zed" project:

one of my favourite kinds of caricatures to draw is celebrities who many people seem to find attractive, who, in my opinion, just aren't! this is one of those. i've never understood what any guy sees as attractive in her face, and this was my chance to show what i see when i look at her. a swollen-looking face and a constant squinty, puckery expression that somehow just annoys the heck out of me!

here's renee zellweger:



and i'm done!

thanx for all the comments and critiques and encouragement and stuff. without all that, i probably wouldn't have finished this project. now on to 2009...

great googily-moogily! i'm finally posting a "z"!

had a few minutes today to do up a very quick sketch for my "z" male. not much more time at the moment, so excuse the lack of rendering and the lazy hair work. this is another one i intend to revisit later in the year, and, like i said with my bjork caricature, i think the subject matter requires a more unconventional rendering.

frank zappa:

the screechin' banshee who broke up the beatles. yeah, that's right! i said it! she broke up the beatles!

a lot of spare time this week. here's "y" female (another very quick sketch): yoko ono.



and, with that, i am officially CAUGHT UP!

woo-hoo! i didn't think that would happen before the end of the year! mind you, i'm not sure how much time i can expect to have over the next two weeks, and i may still not get done by year's end, but at least i'm a lot closer than i thought i'd be.

DUDE! THIS CARICATURE IS SOOOOO AWESOME!!!! IT RULES!!! YEEEEAAAAHHHH!!!! WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

one thing i haven't done as much of on this a to zed project as, in retrospect, i wish i had, was caricaturing people with whom i'm not familiar, for the practice of working with faces i've never or seldom seen. so when a friend of mine suggested yngwie malmsteen be my "y" male, i said, "sure, y not?"

it seems this guy is some kinda famous guitarist. apparently quite a good one, if you go in for that searing, shredding guitar style that prioritizes playing lots of notes really fast over following any sort of discernible melody.

here is what i learned about yngwie in my search for reference photos of him:

1. you can tell just by looking at pictures of the guy that he clearly thinks very highly of himself. every posed photo has this pouty facial expression that's consciously designed to make huge-haired women weak with desire, and all guys think "man, that guy is so cool!"

2. he has the single awrsomest album cover in the history of the music industry. check it out, dude! it totally rocks!!!http://www.galeon.com/allmusic/caratulas/yy/Yngwie_Malmsteen_-_Trilogy-front.jpg

here's yngwie malmsteen:

of all the women i could have drawn with names starting with "x"...

some of you may recall (and some of you may not, and that's okay too) that waaaaay back when i started all this, i gave myself the rule that it was okay to use character names as well as real names when choosing a subject. well, here i am all the way to the exes, finally taking advantage of that rule for the first time. that's all right, though, as the letter "x" was precisely the reason i made that rule.

so here's my "x" female: xena mctavish.

i'm just kidding. it's just xena. does she even have a last name? i don't know. fan art this is not!

i realize the cleanup on this is kinda sloppy and amateurish. i was going for a classic comic book look without actually knowing much "theory" about how those artists approached shading and colouring. also, for that look, i should have done this in flash instead of sketchbook. it would have created a much tighter look.

anyway, enough rambling. here's xena:

so.... i'm posting something here.... uh... yeah, i got nothin'.

had more time today than expected, so i did a bit more work on this:

"x" is for "xylophone". because "x" is always for "xylophone".

here's an alternate version of my winona ryder. the excellent chris wahl suggested maybe i'd made her too angular and, as he put it, "harsh". so i made some changes. i like both versions. if anyone has any opinions as to which looks more like her, i'll take them.




also, here's my "x" male: malcolm x. i really wanted to go a little further with this one, and add some airbrush shading, but i just didn't have time. maybe one day...

try pronouncing her name phonetically! it's fun!

here's my rough sketch for this month's caricature jam over at drawingboard.org . it's bjork. i'm no fan of her freakin' weird music, but i always thought she'd make a good caricature, so i'm glad to participate.

when (read:"if") i get around to doing a finished version of this, i feel like the freakin'weird subject matter kinda demands a less conventional approach to the rendering, so at that time, you can expect to see a very different sort of style from my usual. so... you've got that to look forward to, if nothing else. but if that is the biggest thing you have to look forward to, i'd suggest getting away from your computer for a while and... doing stuff.

anyway, here's bjork:

i guess you could say she "stole" my heart, a-ha-ha.

"w" female: winona ryder. okay, i may be pushing it calling her famous these days, but dangit, i've been kinda in love with her ever since beetlejuice!

wwwwwwwwwowwwwwwww! that's a lot of doubleyous!

i just couldn't decide on one "w" male. there were too many i really wanted to do. i managed to narrow it down to four. it's been a busy couple of lunch hours these last few days.

first, you probably won't be able to comment on likeness on this one unless you have small children, or possibly, if you're just australian (elliot? do you still show your face around here these days?)

it's the wiggles:


second, one of my all-time favourite comedians, steven wright. i'm not quite sure what his look is these days, so i just went with his classic appearance:



third (i think my favourite of the bunch), eagles guitarist and seriously underappreciated solo artist, joe walsh:



and finally, because my friend ian practically begged me, down on bended knee and with tears brimming in his eyes, in a pretty pathetic display of emotion and desperation (read: "casually suggested it"), tom waits (though i'm afraid i don't feel i really brought much to this one that you've never seen in any other tom waits caricature) :


all comments welcome.