Q: Have you or any caricature artists you know been sued by a celebrity for using their image in a caricature?

A: The area of law you are referring to is called the “right of publicity”, and I have written a number of blog posts about this subject over the years. The short answer to your question is no, I have never been sued nor to my knowledge has any specific caricature artist been sued for a caricature of a celebrity. The closest I ever got was when Arnold Schwarzenegger walked by my caricature booth at the Mall of America years ago and saw his caricature as one of my samples. He demanded we take it down. We refused, citing it was

1. Not for sale
2. Being used to demonstrate our abilities to capture a likeness, for which we needed to display someone who would be identifiable, thus fair use.

He left and we never heard back from him… he was probably too busy knocking up his household servants to bother.

While no caricaturist I know or have heard of has been sued,  a few I know have been threatened with legal action, and there have been many right of publicity cases that involved portraits or, in one case involving the afore mentioned Governator, a bobblehead. I see a lot of caricaturists selling prints of their work that not only probably violate specific celebrity’s right of publicity, but corporate copyright and trademark as well (doing a caricature of an athlete showing their team uniform, for example, violates the pro sport’s leagues trademark). These artists are leaving themselves wide open for being sued—and losing.

Here is a long-winded but comprehensive blog post I did years ago on the subject, complete with references to specific court cases:

Caricature and the Right of Publicity

A few years ago a colleague of mine who does party caricatures in southern California was contacted by comedian Jay Leno about an ad the artist had in the local Yellow Pages. The artist had used a caricature he had done of Leno as part of his ad, and Leno took exception to that. According to the artist, Leno was quite nice about it, but made it plain he did not want to see his image used for advertising this artist’s services. Leno did not sue, but he did ask for the artist to stop using his image, and if he did not a lawsuit likely would have followed. Did the artist have the right to use Leno’s caricature, or anyone’s caricature for that matter, to advertise his services? Can a caricaturist sell copies of his caricature of Jack Nicholson or any celebrity on T-shirts at some store or over the internet? How about all those caricature prints selling daily on eBay? Each case has it’s own individual facts and facets, but the underlying law that allows public figures (or private ones, for that matter) to protect the value of their own image is called the Right of Publicity. (more…)

A warm up sketch of recent Oscar winner Christopher Plummer.

This week’s sketch subject is Dexter star Jennifer Carpenter. She has a very long face, a crooked mouth and small, angular eyes very far apart.

Bit of a cheat this week for the SotW as this is a portion of a job I’m working on. Park of the rough sketch, thus the very loose drawing. I’ll post the final art when it’s appropriate. I would hope it’s obvious this is a caricature of Albert Einstein.

Well, this is more of a retouch rather than a bonus sketch. I dug out this old sketch of Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, when I needed to put a bunch of pictures of recognizable overweight celebrities in the background of the splash page of the Mike & Molly parody I did for the last issue of MAD. I did a VERY quick colorizing job on the black and white pencil sketch with the above results. The image printed very tiny in the magazine (about 1/2 inch square), thus the very loose paint job. Shatner is notoriously hard to caricature, and I think the color adds a lot to the likeness.

This week’s sketch subject is multiple-Grammy winning singer Adele, who is a major celebrity around the Richmond household. She is The Lovely Anna‘s favorite, and my kids are all musically gifted singers and musicians who appreciate great talents. Adele is a great talent, no question. You need only look at the Grammy performances to see that. While Rhianna, Nikki Minaj and others had elaborate productions and stageshows, Adele needed only a microphone and a spotlight, and blew them all away. The Richmond clan are big fans, so I spent a little longer than usual on this sketch as a result . . . although I still got a dirty look from Anna because I drew Adele “too fat” in her opinion.

Here’s a quick warm-up sketch of the new Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield. Can’t really tell if that’s what his hair looks like after a few hours of swinging around NYC in the Spidey-suit, or it’s like that all the time. Gotta wonder if I’ll end up drawing a movie parody of this film for MAD. I have no idea if MAD will even DO a parody of this one, since we did all the Tobey MaGuire Spider-Man films (I did the art for the first two), and maybe they are going to be sick of doing reboots that are only six years apart.

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.