This week’s SotW subject is Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Michael Peter Balzary aka “Flea“. He wasn’t naked in the picture I drew this from, but as he was known for playing entire concerts naked back in the late 1990′s… thus the Full Monte treatment.

This week’s SotW subject is Saturday Night Live alumni Chris Farley. I did a few studies of various late, portly comedians as part of a project I worked on… maybe another one will show up next week Wednesday.

A quick sketchbook study of the late comedian and actor John Candy.

Kicking off the 2012 edition of the “Sketch o’the Week” is one of The Black Key’s drummer Patrick Carney. I came across a picture of him on CNN and couldn’t resist. According to an upcoming interview in Rolling Stone, Patrick thinks the band Nickelback is killing the rock and roll genre. Not sure I agree that rock and roll is dying, but I do agree Nickelback sucks.

A little late today, but here is the Sketch o’the Week, American Horror Story star Connie Britton. A few friends of mine who know my tastes in TV and films, including my wife The Lovely Anna, suggested I give American Horror Story a look. I did, having seen the entire run over the last few weeks via iTunes and my DVR. I have to say my mind is still not made up on the show. Some aspects of it are very engaging and cool, and it is extremely creepy, but for some reason it just hasn’t hooked me all the way. Maybe tonight’s season finale will do the trick. I did like the Black Delilah episode a lot, and Jessica Lange‘s performance as Constance is fantastic. Britton’s Vivien Harmon seems to have this perpetual exhausted frown on her face, as well as the lowest hairline on TV since Eddie Munster.

Didn’t have time for a more involved sketch today, so here is a small and quick study of the pixie-ish Michelle Williams.

Clicky to Embiggen

Since I missed last week’s SotW, this week it’s a two-for-one! In honor of writer extraordinaire Mark Evanier‘s ongoing series “Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy” on his blog, here is my take on the Great Stan and Ollie. These might be the two most caricatured/cartooned film stars in history.

One of the typical things you will find in any how-to book is a definition of the book’s subject. It is cliche but a good jumping-off point. On page 2 of my book The Mad Art of Caricature, I wanted to play the definition card. The problem was that the best definition I ever heard was one I could not for the life of me remember where I had heard it. That definition was:

“A caricature is a portrait with the volume turned up.”

I spent a fair amount of time trying to find out where I had heard that quote. At the time I wrote the book (late last spring) I did several Google searches for variations on the quote, and came up empty (actually just my own blog and that of a fellow caricaturist who I knew did NOT originate that quote came up). I paged through several caricature books I had including Bob Staake‘s The Complete Book of Caricature, Stephen Heller and Gail Anderson‘s The Savage Mirror and Wendy Wick Reaves‘ Celebrity Caricature in America… nada. I even asked a few other caricaturists I knew if they had any idea who said that. Again, no dice. I finally gave up and went with the following for the book:

From the Mad Art of Caricature, Chapter 1, Page 2:

The best definition I’ve ever heard—and sadly I cannot recall the source—is:

“A caricature is a portrait with the volume turned up.”

Some time after the book’s release I got an email from caricature illustrator extraordinaire John Kascht, letting me know that the quote was his. Hearing that, I am now sure I must have heard that quote during John’s presentation at the National Caricaturist Network’s annual convention in 2000 In San Diego, when he was the special guest speaker. That definition really stuck in my head, although my recollection of where I had heard it did not. That was 11 years ago…

John was mentioned two other times in the book as an example of excellence in caricature illustration, and is an artist I greatly admire. I feel badly that he did not get proper credit for the quote in my book, but I feel I did as much due-diligence as I reasonably could to find out who to attribute it to. Failing that, I made certain that anyone reading the book would not mistake that the definition was mine or think I was claiming it to be.

If the book ever goes to a second printing, this mistake will be corrected. In the meantime I wanted at least the readers of my blog to know who that terrific definition should be attributed to, with my apologies to John.

This week’s sketch is done in honor of Number One Son Thomas, 15, who thinks Zooey Deschanel is “the greatest person in the world”… Translation: “She’s hot.”

Q: I know you do a lot of different kinds of humorous illustration, but you are primarily known for doing caricatures. What first got you interested in drawing caricatures? Was it something you started doing as a kid, or did you discover it later?

A: I started typing out an answer to this one, then realized that the following excerpt from the preface of my book said it better, and I’d already written it!…

From The Mad Art of Caricature!:

When I was a young man, drawing caricatures for a living never struck me as something I was interested in doing. I never opened a magazine and saw a great caricature of some celebrity and realized in a forehead-slapping moment of epiphany, that’s what I want to do! In fact, I wasn’t even aware caricature was an art form. The whole thing kind of snuck up on me, and the people to blame are Mr. Chilson and the Fasen Brothers.

Mr. Chilson was my seventh-grade art teacher at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1979. The school was so small that we had our art classes in the same room they held the shop classes, sitting on barstools at tall worktables, while another grade’s art class was going on at the same time on the other side of the large workshop. One day Mr. Chilson started a lesson on caricature. I was sitting in the back, not paying attention, as usual, and drawing in my notebook. While Mr. Chilson was explaining what a caricature was, I was drawing one of the other teacher, who was only a few dozen feet away from me . . . except I didn’t know it was a caricature. To me, it was just my drawing of the other teacher.

“RICHMOND!” Mr. Chilson yelled in my ear. “You are in THIS class, not THAT one!” He was standing next to me. One of the drawbacks of being absorbed in a drawing at the expense of paying attention in class was that I never heard the teacher coming. That resulted in many startling yells in my ear. He snatched away the notebook, glanced at it, glared at me, and then instructed me loudly in front of everybody to see him after class as he returned to the front of the room with my confiscated notebook in hand. Resigned to getting detention at the least, I meekly hung back and watched my schoolmates shuffle out following the bell.

Instead of giving me detention, Mr. Chilson sent me around the school over the next several days to draw about two dozen of the teachers, and then he displayed my work in the glass case at the top of the stairs right in front of the art/shop room.  I guess he liked my drawing of the other art teacher—or maybe he hated the guy and sent me around to draw all the other teachers he disliked so they could be ridiculed publicly and I’d be to blame. I was never sure. Regardless, that was my first exposure to the art of caricature, as well as my first understanding of what caricature was.

I then promptly forgot all about caricature for about six years.

In 1985, I was at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, attempting to study commercial art. It had been a year or so, and I’d had only one art class as they were impossible to get into as an underclassman, and the one I was “lucky” enough to get into was a complete waste of time. “Alternative Sculpture” was one of those art classes that was 99% pretension and 1% actual, useful art instruction. I was skipping it one day, hanging about the commons area, when I spied a flyer on the wall asking “Can You Draw?” It ended up being an ad seeking caricature artists to draw at the local amusement park for a company called Fasen Arts. I suddenly recalled Mr. Chilson and my seventh-grade show and thought this would make a great summer job. I secured an interview and dragged an overflowing folder of drawings I’d done from some magazine photos with me to meet with Steve Fasen, an accomplished caricaturist and the owner of Fasen Arts.

I didn’t get the job.

Some weeks later Steve called and offered me a spot at a different theme park near Chicago, about 450 miles southeast. I was later told this opportunity opened up only because someone else had backed out, but that hardly would have mattered to me at the time—nor does it matter in hindsight. I packed up my things and moved to Waukegan, Illinios, where I spent the summer drawing caricatures with a group of very talented artists headed by Steve’s brother Gary, a brilliant caricaturist and illustrator. There I learned a great deal about drawing and cartooning, discovered the realities of making a living as an artist, renewed my appreciation for a certain magazine that would later become an important part of my life, and, most importantly, fell in love with the art of caricature completely and for good.

That pretty much sums it up, except to add that I continued to draw caricatures all through grade and high school, although I wasn’t really conscious what I was doing was “caricature’. I was just drawing funny pictures of my friends and teachers. I did a series of comic stories casting myself and my high school friends as infants but imbuing them with our current personality traits and faults. Those were caricatures, in a way. Lord knows I got in trouble a few times for drawing my teachers in less-than-complimentary ways. Still, I was pretty dense and never put the term “caricature” and what I was doing together until that job at Six Flags.

Thanks to Rich Griffin for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!