From The Freelance Files

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Last week in the Sunday mailbag I promised to post about a recent job I completed that reminded me (again) of why I turn down most jobs that involve doing caricatures of the actual client, or their employees. See that post for the reasons why, but here are the gory details of the job that resulted in the final art above (I have changed the names to protect the guilty):

I get a call from a company that works in the film industry that wanted me to do a parody/homage of the classic Animal House movie poster, only with caricatures of their sixty-plus employees and bosses. It was to be used as an ad in an industry publication and as a mocked-up movie poster for their offices. Initially I turned them down for two reasons. First, I wasn’t too wild about having to ape Rick Meyerowitz‘s art style for the job… this isn’t strictly speaking a parody like I might do for MAD, which would require closely mimicking the original’s look for purposes of making fun of either it or something else in context. second, and more importantly, I don’t like doing jobs for company’s where the employees and bosses are the subjects. It almost always leads to my imitating a Glamour Shots camera.

After some talking the first point was mitigated as this was a company working in the movie business, so doing caricatures of them in a classic movie poster setting seemed more like an homage than a rip-off. Plus, I made it clear while I would try and capture the look and feel of the original I was still going to draw it more my way, especially the caricatures. The second point was of more concern, and I was promised that only the two heads of the company would be approving the caricatures, and they loved my MAD work and wanted me to do what I do.

I am such a sucker.

Naturally I had to redo many of the caricatures out of concern for the “feelings” of their employees. They seemed to mostly have a problem with noses, and many of the profiles I did had to get toned down. more than just toned down, really, they became very dry pseudo-portraits. Here are a few examples. On the left is the picture I worked from, center my caricature, right the final approved revision:

Considering these printed very small in the final (even at the actual poster size of 60 inches high… they wanted something BIG for the office) the plain and boring nature of the revised carica… uh… portriacatures, really served to kill much of the fun feel of the piece. I did start to get frustrated when I found out the bosses wife was art directing his caricature. BUT, the client is the boss so I did what they asked.

Basically every freelance project starts out being about the art and doing the best job I can do to accomplish the client’s goals. Some jobs are about that all the way through. Others degenerate into being just about finishing the project and cashing the paycheck. That’s sad but that’s also reality, and the track of any job is ultimately up to the client. It never does cease to amaze me how someone would hire a particular artist for their “expertise”, for lack of a better word, in a certain style and then proceed to direct them away from the very style they hired them for in the first place. Caricature may be uniquely vulnerable to that sort of issue. You have to divorce your personal feelings from the work when things get to the point where the client is asking you to do something you don’t think is very good anymore. That’s when it does get frustrating… not because you are asked to make changes, that happens all the time and there are many different ways to accomplish a goal in an illustration job… but because you are being asked to do something that isn’t what you do.

I did remove my signature, though… I have that right to not have my name under a piece of work I am not happy with. I’ll have to remember this job the next time I get promised there won’t be vanity revisions in a piece like this one.