Sunday Mailbag- Why Caricature?

Q: I think it’s safe to say that caricature is a central part of your illustration career. What caused you to chose that as a focus?

A: I sort of stumbled into it actually. Caricature was something I never really consciously tried to do until I got a summer job drawing caricatures at a theme park after my first year of college. It was during that summer of 1985 that I really fell in love with the art form.

It’s not like I hadn’t done it before. I just didn’t really connect the term “caricature” with what I did. I drew funny pictures of my teachers. I did a bunch of funny comic book stories depicting the adventures of my friends and I. I did some editorial cartoons for the school newspaper. All of these drawings were caricatures, but I never put the name to what I was doing. I wasn’t consciously trying to exaggerate, or really studying/dissecting the face. I just tried to draw them funny. The result was a caricature, although certainly not all of them were very good.

When I was in fifth grade our art class did a unit on caricature. While the teacher was lecturing on what a caricature was, I was not paying attention and doing one of my “funny drawings” of another teacher who was with a second class nearby. My teacher busted me not paying attention, and confiscated my drawing. He looked at it and then instructed me to see him after class. I hung back as the class filed out, expecting to get chewed out. Instead, he sent me around the school during my art class period all the next week drawing caricatures of other teachers and he did a little show of my work in a glass case in the main hall outside the art room. That was fun but I didn’t give caricature another thought for about 6 years.

Fast forward to 1985, and that summer job at Six Flags. I worked with a number of really talented caricaturists, and came to realize there was a lot more to it than just drawing “funny pictures”. I learned a lot from Gary Fasen, Dave Kamish and Mark Sanislo, the veteran artists I worked with all that summer. I went back to college that fall considering myself a “caricature artist.”

Word got around my very small art school that I did caricatures, and it led to what was really my first freelance job. It was from one of my professors, who taught graphic design but also owned a design firm in the Minneapolis area. We wanted to hire me to do caricature of three morning radio DJs to use for a logo his firm was designing for their show. It was then I realized that caricature was a very useful tool to have in your illustration toolbox. The ability to do good, funny likenesses gets you a lot of work. That’s partly because not a lot of illustrators can do it, but mostly because at the bottom all media stories are about people, and images of people that aren’t photos are something that never goes out of style. Caricature is also very versatile. You can do a very “mean guy” derogatory caricature for something that is critical of someone, or a “nice guy” whimsical and just humorous caricature for a complementary story. There are a wide range of applications for caricature in illustration, and being able to do them is a real asset.

Thanks to Grant Jonen for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!