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.