Jeff

Portrait of swimmer (and John Williams fan) Jeff Commings, with whom I've had the pleasure of hosting three episodes of The Baton podcast, available here:

https://thebatonpodcast.podbean.com/e/episode-24-story-of-a-woman/

https://thebatonpodcast.podbean.com/e/episode-62-the-witches-of-eastwick/

https://thebatonpodcast.podbean.com/e/episode-77-sabrina/

I really look up to Jeff: besides being a professional athlete (which is already commenadble for the discipline and dedication required, let alone the stamina) and a teacher, he's incredibly polite, articulated, intelligent, brave and entreprising.

Recommended reading:

Odd Man Out: An Autobiography

More composers

Had some more fun with more portraits/caricatures of Hollywood composers.

Alfred Newman

Bernard Herrmann

Jerry Goldsmith

Updates....

Some more recent art and sketches.

The first one is a promotional piece for Nerd Anti Zombie, the second novel by my dear friend Francesco Nucera.

The brief was to make an illustration that'll be printed on a t-shirt, featuring Bill Gates attacked by zombie Steve Jobs coming out of his grave.

My first sketches had a different layout

but upon seeng them, Francesco suggested to change the design in order to make it look like the cover of the first issue of Dylan Dog, an incredibly popular horror comic book in Italy.

This choice, perfectly understandable because it would add an additional intertextual reference and therefore reinforce the visual joke, posed a problem: having two real people in the picture required that I showed both faces, yet I needed Jobs to be the prominent zombie in the composition, if not the only one.

This meant I could not place him behind Bill Gates (it wouldn't be as menacing if relegated to the background) nor I could place him in front of him but also turned towards him.

I resolved that by making Jobs crawl out of his grave but unaware of the presence of his former Sylicon Valley competitor.

Bill Gates' pose, the tree and moon in the background are swiped in order to make the image a direct parody of the orignal. Hopefully Claudio Villa won't mind.

To complete the joke, I've colored the piece to replicate the original cover and added a logo in the same font.

And here you can see the finished product:

The following piece is a caricature of Italo Calvino

created as promotional art for an event.. I'm happy with the style, but I don't think I totally nailed the likeness...

I think I've done better with these other caricatures

Danny Elfman

Ennio Morricone

And since I really took a liking for caricatures people, I gave a shot to a couple of other movie-people

Steven Spielberg

Alexandre Desplat

These last two being only sketches at this point.

The following is my  most recent caricature, featuring composers/podcasters MArty and Will Brueggeman from the Underscore Podcast.

Deconstructing Woody

I'm not going to discuss any of the alligations and accusations directed at Mr. Allen here and their impact on the legacy of this prolific writer/comedian/director.
 I'm not informed nor is this relevant to this post.

It's just that in my recent interest in caricatures I came across the work of very different, yet all very talented artist and I wanted to compare their styles based on the same subject.

With his attitude and features, Woody Allen has created something of a modern "Maschera da Commedia dell'Arte", and this gave a lot of latitude to caricaturists.

The first in our series is Jack Davis, renowed and prolific illustrator from the 50sto the 2000s. Active in comics (various EC and warren titles, not to mention MAD MAgazine) advertising, movie posters and more, Jack Davis has been possibly the most famous "big feet" artist for decades.

This is a detail from his poster from Allen's Bananas.

As much as I love Davis, I have to say his take on allen is possibly the weakest of the bunch.

I'm not diminishing his work at all, Jack Davis had a knack for posters and humourous illustrations for sure ans d his works exude personality. If anything, Davis' personality is coming maybe too strongly across. It is almost like he drew a JAck Davis character that appears to share some feature with Woody Allen (the thick rimmed spectacles, the unkempt hair, the long nose).

Akin in style to Jack Davis, but arguably more gifted a portraitist is Mort Drucker.

Hard to pick one out from the two, but I'd go for Drucker for this reason.
This ensemble portrait gallery is clear evidence of that.

Mort Drucker

Another well known caricaturist is David Levine, whose pen-and-ink crosshatching is reminiscent of satirical prints of older centuries.

David Levine

Differently from Davis and Drucker, Levine's characters do not have to live in an environment or to interact much with other people, props or background.

therefore the artist can have a lot of liberty with proportions and with the degree of detail he wants to put in to it.

And to the opposite side of the spectrum, we have Al Hirshfield, to this day possibly one of the classiest and most refined charicaturists of the twentieth century.
Hirshfield worked hard to distill the essence of his subjects in a few, elegant lines.

Jack Davis

This tradition of of great stylisation is still alive today, thanks to artists like the argentinian Pablo Lobato, and his amazing poppy and yet constructivist portraits.

Pablo Lobato

But comics can do stylization too.

Check out how Woody Allen, who has been the subject of a syndacated stryp for quite some time, has been synthetized to a few pen strokes by cartoonist Stuart Hample.

Stuart Hample

More caricatures

I've been enjoying making caricatures lately, and making them quick (sort of).

Tim Burton: motivated by the news of the upcoming exhibit in Genk, i sketched this one on my sketchpad and left it half-finished until a couple of days ago, where I've blown it up a little bit and touched it up, adding the 'big f***ing Jackie-O glasses' (cit: Kevin Smith)

Quick warm up sketch. of my friend and mentor Serge Baeken.

Yet another "farewell present", this time for a colleague. The most caricature-y I've done so far. I'm ok with it, yet I think the original sketch got the likeness slightly better.

The incomparable Alan Moore, after Milt Kahl's Merlin form Disney's "The Sword in the Stone".

Portrait (ish)

The raison d'etre of this blog is still unclear to me.

The very little number of visits and reactions suggest this is nothing more than a message in a bottle, a "wafer offered to infinity" (or "endlessly offered", depending on how you translate this quote from the french movie Tous les Matins du Monde).

It looks like I'm still undecided about making this a place to share things I make, or things I discover or things I think.

A bit of all three, I suppose.

However, I had some fun with the following stuff I drew and I see no wrong in posting it here.

These are two group caricatures I did in the last 15 months for people leaving the parents council at my kid's school.

These were not meant to poke fun at them, but rather as an affectionate farewell present.

I looked to a lot of Mort Drucker to find inspiration, but he's on another planet. I would not even describe mine as real caricatures, but rather as slightly disproportioned portraits.

And since caricatures turned out to be quite fun, I took a shot to Harrison Ford, both young and old.

A few tips on how to approach caricatures are found on the website of MAD magazine's Tom Richmond, very recommended.

The next one is drawn after a from a photo by belgian photographer Sanne De Wilde. I'm kind of happy with the style. I love artist who can create a lot of texture and volume with biro.

This led to further caricature/pen experiments.

(good ol' Tim Burton needs extra work, even as a sketch is feels too inconclusive).

And for last, something definitely cuter, once again, inspired by the amazing work of Sara Ogilvie.

(This reminds me I'll dedicate one of the next post to women who inspire me).