This is a caricature I did recently for a friend and real inspiration of mine.
Gregg Tipton is the founder and director of Ten Days Missions http://www.tendaysmissions.org/ , the organization we recently went to Baja Mexico with. I wanted to try a colored line technique I’ve been working on, as well as a bit more layered, watercolor look to the coloring. Hope ya like it!

There must be something in the water in my house. Here’s my youngest daughter a few months ago… before her third birthday this month… with her self portrait. I was amazed when she picked up her “Magna Doodle” and when I asked her what she was drawing, she said “I Draw Me”. This is what she produced:

It’s even funnier when you realize that up to a few months before this, she really had very little hair. Her hair did look a bit like this, just a spot on top. I was blown away. She draws all the time and her Pre-K teachers have already pegged her as “the artist” in the class. Too cool.

This is just me playing around with a cute, toony version of one of the Thundercats characters for The Toony Bin character design site.

It’s funny, in “real life” I “need” a comfortable chair, and my fancy easel, and my special drawing paper that’s just the right size and weight. Well, maybe it’s not so funny, ya know? On the mission trip to Baja, I was perfectly content in the BLAZING sun, no shade for miles, sitting on two concrete blocks in the middle of a sandy field, drawing on a sketchbook barely bigger than my hand. And the people loved the drawings, as a bonus.
When you’re using your talents for the one who gave them to you, it’s incredibly fulfilling.

I told my wife, I’ve never felt so fulfilled… so confident that I knew I was in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing… in my entire life.

Here’s a pic of our mission team from our local church, HighPoint Church, here in Orlando Florida. This was taken at the Orlando airport before we flew to San Diego, and then got on a bus to Rosarito Beach in Baja Mexico.
Each morning, we were bussed out again to a small village named Terazzas. We built a church, built a house, fed a vileage full of people, and told people about the love of Christ. This first day, though, all I wanted to do was hide behind my pen and paper!
I drew lots of caricatures of the locals while I was there. Nearly 200 of them, most of them on two different days.

It was cool to use my talents for HE who gave them to me, and to see people’s faces light up when they got the drawings. God truly does use the simple things, sometimes…

Growing up back in the 70s, when I wasn’t reading comic books, I read the original Tarzan novels. He’s always been one of my favorite characters, so awhile back, I thought I’d take a cartoony swing at him in my sketchbook :
The “real” Tarzan was quite different from the Hollywood versions of him, of course. In Burroughs’ books, you really got the feel that he was barely controlling the “animal” side of himself. I put the scar over his eye, since I seem to remember that from the books…the scar would appear whenever he’d go into an “animal rage”. The closest Hollywood ever got to him, in my opinion, was “Greystoke” (parts of that were dead-on), and, strangely enough, Disney’s Tarzan (minus all of the talking, SINGING animals).

In the comics, I kind of liked Kubert’s take and Buscema’s, but there was a series about ten years ago, that was drawn by Mark Wheatley (don’t remember the writer), that had a lot of the true spirit of the ape man.

Oh yeah, and since I’m a child of the 70s, I remember faithfully watching both the reruns of the goldenboy Tarzan of Ron Ely, and the Filmation cartoons. The latter, looking back, were awful. But, I spent a lot of my childhood playing in the yard, reciting the opening, “I am Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. This is my domain, and I protect those who come here. AHHHOOOAHHHHHH-ahhhh-uhhh-ahhh-ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Long live the King of the Jungle!!!

This is one of a group of illustrations I did for a good client of mine. Since over the years I’ve done so many gift caricatures, whether they’re of single people or huge groups for corporate clients, it’s fun to do this kind of thing. My guidelines were ” Two young hip people, one guy and one girl, using lots of tech…. laptops, blackberry, cellphone, ipod, etc. At large conference table.” It’s on their website, and in some printed materials for them, so in order to have a lot of flexibility with the images, they requested I leave plenty of open space around the characters, with no real background behind them.

I’m actually getting a lot more of this type of project where I can do my character design/cartoon illustration style, and I like it. I’ll try to post some other recent examples as well.