Illustration Throwback Thursday #29

Back in 2006 a company that wanted to market a series of drinking mugs featuring the caricatured heads of celebrity athletes called “Mugheads” called me to do some caricatures for some prototypes. The idea was they would pitch these to pro sports teams as stadium giveaways, etc. The product never got off the ground but they did produce a couple of prototype “mugheads”, including one of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. I discovered early that it was going to be tough to do these designs because they

1) had to conform to a general mug shape in order to work with the product and

2) they wanted less of a caricature and more of a cartoony sort of version of the subject

The image above is the final I did for their production team, although quite frankly I thought it looked little like McNabb by the time we were done with all the art direction. Turns out it didn’t matter, since the mug didn’t look much like my drawing: