Caricature

Harking back once again to earlier times in my cartooning career, one of the main planks in my contract work was caricaturing travel industry notables to accompany a featured 'cover story' in every issue of TravelWeek. I had always been interested in caricature, honing my observation and interpretation skills by doodling family members, relatives, friends and work colleagues over many years prior to dipping my toe into the professional pond.

More on the technical adventures in a future post. Meanwhile, today's examples are from the period in which the newspaper became a glossy colour news-magazine (c1993) and, my comic hand-drawn portraits retained a cartoony outlined look rather than a painterly manner of humorous depiction which gradually took over until the late 90's when ink on paper succumbed to the beginning of computer processing of artwork. The size of reproduction varied depending on the graphic designer's layout of each article. However, the original artwork was always on a light art-board with the image occupying a space of 210 x 280mms.

With the pool of subjects covering all of Australia and some international personalities, it was very rare for me to be called upon to 'do' the same person more than once. However, I noticed recently that Bob Annells, whom I recall was a well-known Victorian tourism nabob, did draw (pun intended) the short-straw more than once.