chu..chu lab, chu lab

the biggest coolest thing happening in the world of caricatures is that Eric Goodwin just put out a full length album of songs about live caricatures. if you're a caricature artist, this is wild wild news and you're probably thinking "well,drawing caricatures is an important part of MY life, but who else would ever want to hear crazy songs about live caricatures besides us?" the answer is people. thats who. everybody and there dumb cousin bill are gonna listen to this bizarre beast of an album. i can feel it in my bones. 

whats going on in my world these days is me and saemee are down here drawing at santas in miami. ive been collabing with chua now and then. We've had some awesome customers and have been able to make some fun and different things. if you think the pictures are wacky and full of hutspa, you should have seen the actual people. so now, without further ado, a set of creations, documents, if you will of the couples weve run into. i hope you'll cherish them as much as we cherished making them.

How wild is this mans face. answer: very wild.

Chris drew the guy on the left. me the girl on the right. most of these took about 1 hour. but we always make sure they know they dont gotta sit still like a statue the whole time. mostly theyre very gracious and patient with us with things like holding smiles and stuff. i try to hold a smile with them so we can empathise together. lately ive been able to get chua into doing simple backgrounds. i do a thing i call series1c where i go for the whole body and try to caricature their fashion and stuff. chua's bodies within that world feel so goofy sometimes. i just love it.

look at that banana body just balancing there. 

Miami is definitely the best place for drawing fashion.

ah. names is the other thing. we work the name nice and big into the composition when they go for gettin the name on there. names is just 2 dollars. a steal for how big we make it.

if the clothes or bodies don't strike me and chua starts doing his half with full body, sometimes i'll have to pull this move. but this man had a great face so i got to focus on all its juicy assets. this guy was real funny and relaxed and just the best customer anybody could have. its my sincere hope that this couple comes back again and again and i get to draw him 50 more times. it would also be weird if he ended up on this blog somehow and read this and somehow that lead to him coming back that would maybe be very akward.

this one got one of the better reactions of the past week or so.

two important points to note. we each did the other guys undersketch. and i drew him standing on lots of little circles.

awesome customers. loved their drawing, and i feel like i got her face pretty good.

he had a big gnarly arm and hand and she was very small so we put her in it. one other thing: this air jordan has two basketball arms. one looks like a head on a long neck.

i like this ones atmosphere a lot. and that drop shadow hits the spot.

another undersketch switch.

and this is my fave and the most recent collab weve done. 

Cartoons Get Caricatures Too

The Simpsons
"Lisa the Beauty Queen" debuted October 15, 1992

The Simpsons

"Sunday, Cruddy Sunday" debuted January 31, 1999

Daria 

"Art Burn" debuted April 2, 2001 

Spongebob Squarepants

"Krusty Love" September 6, 2002

Family Guy 

"Play it Again, Brian" which debuted March 2, 2008

Tintin

Opened on December 23, 2011

Southpark

"Cartman Finds Love" April 25, 2012

 

 Bob's Burgers

"Moody Foodie" debuted May 6, 2012 

  

Gravity Falls

"Mabel's Guide to Art" debuted February 7, 2014 

  

Clarence 

"Zoo" which debuted on July 3, 2014

Uncle Grandpa

"Hundred Dollar Gus", debuted June 8, 2015

Teen Titans Go!

"The H.I.V.E Five" debuted July 27, 2015

 

 

 

100 rejects

  

There's a lot of rejects here. I'm not going to write a little story under every drawing I don't think, but I'll put some little thing things here and there. This first drawing was when I drew some little girls who where at Lotte World (Korean Disney World) without there parents, and I drew the little girls frolicking about. I think Mom rejected this from the comfort of her home.

The poorly drawn bow and peace sign didn't help I'm sure.

Every caricature artist gets rejects now and then. Personally, I want to get better and better at handling them when they happen. 

If a caricature is a type of a joke then it's the same thing like when a joke just doesn't land. It's partly on the joke teller, and he'll say to him self "I shoulda done it this way or that way," and the joke hearer will sometimes take some of it on themselves and be like "I don't get it." So that's the way it goes. 

But then there's the times where the listener is outright offended by a joke and they'll assert that they have a good sense of humor, and claim that the joke being told is offensive. Sometimes the joke teller will react to this —words like "offensive," and chalk up the failure of the joke to the listener being too much of a prude. 

And getting some kind of genuine reaction rather than a golf clap applause is better in many ways, but the point of a caricature is certainly never to make people unhappy.

Sometimes a joke doesn't land. When my joke doesn't land, I take it all kinds of different ways. One way is to understand that I've failed. At the same time I'm hoping it wasn't a total failure. And I'm hoping to learn something, and at the same time I know that the next person who sits down is a completely different thing. Some faces are harder than others. 

But you really can never look at a drawing without seeing the actual customer in real life and say 'of course that was a reject. look at that thing!' because every caricature has two parts. The drawing and the actual person. You're only seeing half of my caricature, so don't judge me too harsh.

Most of my rejects are just drawings that lack pizzazz. Honestly I can't even remember drawing this. I like the upside down witches hat nostrils though.

Drawn from a photo. I think there must be some tradition in Korean culture of giving someone a beautiful picture of themself as a gift. I know there is a thing where you compliment people on their looks as sort of a social kindness. Maybe a gift of a beautiful portrait of that person takes this a step further and says 'look how beautiful you are. See! I keep telling you.' So then people come to a caricature stand, and unless it's abbbbuntalnly clear that the objective is to make fun of the subject's face, issues are going to arise when 
I endeavor to give people the opposite of what they wanted. Yeah, anyway I drew this one from a photo so who knows if it even looks like him.

This is a fun one.

Hair hat

This one was good.

What's wrong with my dragon. Maybe I shoulda gave him wings.

Asymmetrical but not otherwise zany. 

This one shouldna been a reject

This one shoulda and was

 

Every drawing here has two existences. You see it here, as a picture on a blog with no photo or anything. You don't know the girl. So you say, 'hey! that's pretty nice. why would they not like that.' but the other existence this drawing has is it was a picture meant to represent a person and hopefully make people laugh. In that realm, the person saw my drawing, and they saw their kid, and they saw me, and they decided they didn't want to buy the drawing. Maybe they were offended or maybe they were disappointed. maybe I got a bad likeness, maybe this is actually a drawing of a tall skinny white man. or maybe they they thought the drawing was funny but they just didn't want to hang it on their wall and from looking at the other drawings at the stand they got a notion that somebody at the stand would be able to do a drawing that they would want to hang on their wall.

but i imagine that a caricature can be good and worth it and still not have anything to do with how you want to decorate.

You'll notice an awful lot of peace signs in this batch. 

A peace sign can really help seal the deal.

With some of these I just didn't see it coming.

Didn't see it coming

Didn't see it coming

Didn't see it coming

This is a collab I did with Chris Chua. Chris Chua collab rejects are rare but here's one right here.

What I really don't like is when I do a drawing that would have sold to 99% of little girls and the 1% that I drew it for and who rejected it was the one that it actually looked like. I worded that confusing.  

This is one where you just get in trouble for drawing somebody funny, even though that's supposedly what it's all about. But there's some times when it feels like the likeness wasn't all there, but it feels differently diffferent times. It doesn't always feel like these guys just had no sense of humor, and they came to a place where they needed one, and they didn't have one and I got punished for it.

If I'm working in Korea and a Chinese girl comes up by herself and she's pretty and well put together with makeup and stuff, I know I'm dealing with about as tough a crowd as anyone can deal with. This girl rejected it before she saw it pretty much, and I just watched her get more and more tense, and I just heard some kind of Hitchcock score in the back of my head and her friends were laughing. That's another thing. China is a BIG big place so I don't wanna even say some Chinese people are that way or some are this way, because I have had some VERY good Chinese customers, but there must be SOME cultural nook/cranny in China, from which come caricature customers whos laughter is a very BAD sign. if you don't want rejects. 

and I don't. I really really extremely don't. But the way the customer deals with it goes a long way, and I would say there's no Right way to do it, but I would suggest erring on the side of saying less and don't drag it out. 

Didn't see it coming

Didn't see it coming, believe it or not, mostly because the energy of the crowd was really good at the time.

Didn't see it coming

this one we were drawing at Santas Enchanted Forest in Miami and during the slower time we were just basking in how awesome the crowds were. The customers were loving it and we were able to take our time and I felt like as long as the picture is crazy and enthusiastic. You know what I mean like when you look through all these rejects the underlying theme is how drab and humdrum they all look. So anyway Santa's Forest during the slower time, I came to the conclusion that Miami customers are a different ilk. An awesomer ilk than regular customers. So then the season started to pick up and then it was down right busy and we were all drawing faster. And I started to feel a little more stressed. And then some awesome lookin customers sat down and I was like 'take a breath, eggs' (that's one of my nicknames) I say 'take a breath, eggs. this is santas. just take your time, and make it awesome.' In hindsight I should have spent more time getting the girl's face right, but the guy was cool when he got to the counter. He was just standing there looking at it and then he said "this $*** sucks." And so that was a reject.

Mom stopped me before i was finished, but she handled this one really cool, like in her casual sort of mannerism. within earshot of me she told the artist who drew her other daughter "and i want you to draw her too. he knows its nothing personal.." something like that, but I do like it better when they refuse to pay for a drawing of mine that exists rather than one that doesn't.