More Golden Girls!

I had a lot of fun doing that illustration for CNN’s “History of the Sitcom” series, but one of the disappointing things about doing it was all the great characters we had to leave out. Not just the many shows that were not represented at all in the art, but important characters from depicted shows that weren’t included. In order to represent as many shows as possible, they had me only draw a few characters from each show. For the most part it worked. For example, only drawing Jimmy Walker and Esther Rolle from “Good Times” left out some other great main actors from the show, but those two represented the show well. Ditto Henry Winkler from “Happy Days”. The one head scratcher for me was only doing two of “The Golden Girls”. That’s like leaving out George and Ringo when depicting “The Beatles”.

A longtime of pal agreed to the point where he not only bought my original pen and ink drawing of Bea Arthur and Betty White as Dorothy and Rose, but commissioned me to do a matching drawing of Estelle Getty and Rue McClanahan as Sophia and Blanche. I forgot to scan that before I sent it off to him, but today he shared the framed up pieces online, and graciously gave me permission to also share that here. Note the inset signatures of all four stars he’d previously obtained are included under their caricatures. Very cool!