A modern day pipet

How many people have fallen asleep through your powerpoint presentations? Have you started noticing the yawns half-way through? So how do you improve the attention of your audience to make sure they get the message and not the extra sleep they missed out on the night before?

A new client contacted me from a scientific product sales company who wanted to liven up his presentations to sell pipets. You can picture the presentation now – probably quite dull and sleep inducing. And, if it wasn’t the first time he had presented to his clients, then he had an uphill struggle to keep them concentrating. So my solution was to come up with the idea of doing some cartoons for him to illustrate the jumps in technology since the late Victorian era. The only restriction I had was to show the main figure wearing a white coat (it made them look like a scientist). But there is so much you can do to capture a period; fashion, hairstyle, accessories and technology are just some of the props at the cartoonists disposal and of course the sign off image always has the person smiling. So think outside of the box and give a thought to your customers, engage a cartoonist to liven up your powerpoints, it is guaranteed to lift sales and spreads.

Golf caricature

It seems, not only is golf a very popular sport, but it is also a very popular theme for a caricature.

I have a back catalogue of previous golf themed caricatures, teeing off, helicopter landing, putting, driving, with favourite car and even with pet bird,  that it seems I can tap into a lot of expertise and research when creating the latest golf themed commission. Luckily I keep a cupboard full of magazines, of all sports, for reference and even use sketches I have made when out on my field trips. The internet is useful too for material. But what a really great caricature always comes down to is the quality of photo I get for the faces. With the couple (right) I was given a link to their wedding photo album, so I had a lot of choice of pictures to work from. But very often I am not so lucky; recently I was asked to do a football themed caricature and was sent some very out of focus and grainy images of the subject. As I didn’t want to inconvenience the client, I went ahead and had to engage some real artistic license for that one, but luckily I pulled it off and the client liked the finished picture.

Sport is always a good theme for caricatures as it brings the picture to life adding action, movement and dynamism and by creating the caricatures in photoshop allows me to give some very polished finishes to the picture.

Concentrating on the ‘likeness’ pulled me into the picture to make it a success as I concentrated on the subtle skin tones and hues and exagerating the features only slightly. Apparenlty they are going to present the image on a mug and a framed A4 picture. I wonder if I have started a new genre of funny caricature portraits. You never know I might be taking the Mona lisa’s place in the Louve . . . or just hung in another happy customers flat.

Usually you see rather predictable styles when looking on the internet while trying to find a caricaturist today, and when you do come across someone who is different – it is quite refreshing. I suppose the internet is driven by the market. For instance, I doubt many people would commission a caricature in the style of Paul Gascoignes to hang on the wall, it is just too illustrative and editorially biased. I think most people would never hang that above the fireplace to impress. So what makes us make the choices we do? Vanity? Insecurity? or just the in built desire to want to feel good about ourselves when purchasing. Afterall Paul and Jack didn’t commission the caricatures here.