A New Take on Live Caricatures
The new age of live caricatures: Digital! Pros & cons.
Note: I mentioned in the last post I’d be posting a process video of a big caricature job I’m on. That involved recording the whole thing, using 2 input video sources, etc, in software I’m learning. Turns out that first day of a 2 day shoot the sound wasn’t working. Probably for the better.
But, once I figure that nonsense out, I’ll be doing a post on that. But, until then, here’s something else pertinent and fun that I’ve been doing!
Back in 1992 I got a summer job drawing caricatures at a little theme park just outside of Minnesota. I’d known that whatever I pursued in art would center around humor and caricature (and that’s ALL I knew!), and this seemed to be, and was, the perfect launching pad.
The gig was a dream come true: immerse yourself in drawing face after face for 12 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week. After the first summer, though I’m sure my drawings were anything but impressive, you’d have a thousand or so faces of practice, bringing you that much closer to competency… hopefully.
Fast forward to now, though my time in the chair doing live caricatures has taken a backseat to whatever the hell it is I do now, I always have live gigs to fall back on, and to keep me sharp.
A few years ago, the option to draw DIGITAL caricatures came along, with the advent of high quality drawing devices- iPads, Wacom Cintiq Mobile Studios- and things started to get interesting.
The downside is that these gigs require a lot more planning and equipment. Now, rather than a pad of paper and some markers or whatever, you’ve got whatever drawing device (in my case an iPad Pro with that goofy Apple pencil), plus an external monitor to plug in to so people can watch what you’re doing, plus some sort of wireless printer so the customer has something to walk away with, in my case a Canon Selphy 4x6 postcard printer.
The upside is that people shell out double the money for these events. Sold.
As far as the customer experience goes, it’s a pretty impressive attraction at whatever function you’re at. As much as people love to watch a caricature actually being drawn in front of their eyes, something about doing it electronically really catches people off guard. Many had never seen this before, and are impressed at the technology. (Which is humorous to me: my monitor is at least 10 years old, propped up on a cheap guitar stand, my printer is at least that old.) Each drawing has a little link on in it so they can go and download the file I’ve since uploaded to Dropbox or whatever. How futuristic!
There’s always the fear that something won’t go as planned: grabbing the wrong dongle to attach to the iPad with HDMI, USB and a charging port while packing up, having an HDMI cord simply get fussy, or any number of connections simply choosing to not work can muck up the whole experience.
I guess that’s where the doubled rate comes in.
When I do these gigs, I use an unfortunately named app called ProCreate, on the iPad. This program allows the use of an HDMI to stream the screen onto the monitor, and generally works pretty good. I have a big ol’ suitcase loaded with all the equipment that I shlep out to the car before every gig. There’s always the anticipation that something won’t work, but 99 times out of a hundred I get set up in a few minutes and it’s off to the races for a few hours.
There’s also the factor trying to translate the old way of drawing to this format. The coloring in particular- I’m still trying to work out a method for color that’s fast and consistent.
A cool feature of ProCreate (ugh) is its ability to record whatever it is you’re drawing. I didn’t realize this until recently, and since I have a tendency to not clean up the iPad drive, all these little videos were there, waiting for me. Kinda fun to see everything come to life.
Here’s a group of digital caricatures from a few of these gigs, and below the paywall is the ProCreate (cough cough) self generated movie from the actual gig. Neat.
