Tag Archives: caricatures

Something Fun and Different Entertainment

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So I’ve been hinting around at a big project that has been taking up a lot of my time. Well, I started an entertainment agency. It’s called Something Fun and Different. The agency specializes in unique interactive art novelties and unique variety acts. If you’re looking for entertainment and want something you’ve never seen before that is artistic and probably a little bit silly- please give us a holler!

Speed Sketchers Caricatures is a group of specialized speed artists that I have put together and am training to do exactly what I do at gigs, nationwide. This is kind of a big deal for me because I am the only one who does what I do. I have (thankfully) been in demand and have one dedicated back up artist, but sometimes my schedule is just too much for me. I have chosen artists regionally so that everyones time gets used efficiently. (and nobody spends 3 full days traveling to and from a single gig because it’s so far out of the way) We can draw together at some gigs and cover for each other. Also important to note is that the more people that can do speed sketches, the higher the demand for them will be!

Apart from Speed Sketchers, I am also representing digital caricature artists as well as traditional caricature artists. Other artistic novelties of note are silhouette cutout artists, henna, face painting, balloon sculptors, an origami artist, live scene painters, portrait artists, giant mural painters and customized color by number projects! I am also pleased to represent an amazing journalistic photographer, a variety of original singer/songwriter KICK ASS musical acts, a speaker/artist presenter and a world famous magician who holds several world records.

The website is here: http://www.somethingfunanddifferent.com if you are interested in checking it out…. Facebook page is here: http://www.facebook.com/somethingfunanddifferent. New website is already in the works now that I have some additional promotional materials from some of the performers.

It’s going to be a big year! Wish me luck!!

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Interesting NY Times article interviewing one of the Chinese caricature ‘bosses’ in Times Square.

Times Square Artists

My thoughts: Retail caricatures may be free speech but should not be exempt from vendor licensing or paying local sales taxes. Let alone by undocumented immigrants. Reading between the lines of this article, seeing them first hand and knowing how things work for NYC artists who have tried to set up in Times Square, I can tell you – something fishy is going on…

If you try to set up and are NOT Chinese the cops will actually chase you away. The artwork in their displays are snagged from the internet and are done by caricature illustrator friends of mine who are fellow ISCA members (yes, we have a large group and it’s fun sometimes when the someone from our group snaps a photo of their signs and we all know who’s work is on the sign. One of the artists even cheekily confronted one of the Chinese artists when they saw their own illustration on a sign. …no speaka engrish! Lol)

I hear about these artists almost everywhere I’ve been. They sell a caricature for $5-$10 or more, (some good some bad. Honestly some do good work) but then a lady comes over and tries to sell you a matte, plastic sleeve or frame for $20 or something. She’s pretty aggressive! Again, I have seen her in action.

My advise if you are in NYC and want to get some artwork done? Go to Central Park and get one from one of the artists there. They are as good or better artists than the Chinese artists, probably American, probably from NYC and you will probably have a much better experience. I know some of those artists and if they have signs depicting caricatures, they use their own work. They probably have a sketchbook, some business cards, a website and some fine art they can show you as well, and they might even be able to draw your guests at your nieces birthday party!

Holiday greeting card special!

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Ooooo….. some exciting stuff in the works for December. Been very very busy. I’m a man with a PLAN!

In the meanwhile, once again I am offering greeting card/gift caricatures for a special rate for the holidays. $50 gets you a full color digital drawing of 2 people, head and shoulders, a simple background and a holiday message. Extra people, bits and backgrounds are $25 each. Hit me up if you want one! Here’s ours from a few years ago.

This year you can also get a CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT with your custom artwork on it as well!!

4×4 ornaments made from sandblasted crystal! (other sizes and objects available as well, including wine glasses, bottles, etc… just call and ask!)

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sandblasted caricature on crystal

sandblasted caricature on crystal

Recent stuff

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Been traveling again already this fall. So far I have been to NY, PA, IL and KY next week I’ll be in VT and NC too. Most of the time I have been too busy to snap a photo but amazingly I had a minute or two during a very busy event in Potsdam, NY (5th year in a row for that event!) to take a couple of pics.

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When I got home I drew at a wedding at the Western Reserve History Center, which was a pretty cool venue. The bride wanted the copier and most people obliged and made copies  for the bride and groom and left them beside the coper for them after writing a little note on them. I draw at a lot of weddings, which is what I did most of the summer. I can draw around 200 people in 3 hours.

 

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While I was in NY, I went to a school I have worked at about 7 years in a row now. One of my favorites! It’s in a little community by the Canadian border in the Adirondack mountains where there are ponds everywhere and it’s a school for naturalists, lumberjacks and forest rangers. Very cool place and cool students as well. They are very into conservation and their cafeteria program is the most efficient I’ve seen. They recycle, reuse and compost everything. Every time I go there I am always in a hurry to get to the next town (since it’s in the middle of nowwhere). I usually have a little bit of time to take photos and maybe go on a hike but this time I actually had a full day almost to enjoy the scenery. On top of that I was driving from home so I brought along my handy dandy inflatable sit on top kayak with me and finally got to explore the beautiful lake that the college sits on the shore of. (you can just barely make out the school in the distance in the last photo) Here are just a few of my favorite photos from that trip! Enjoy.

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So this week I am drawing at 2 all day events that I’m pretty stoked about. The first is the Great Lakes Brewery’s 25th Anniversary party in Ohio City. I will be there drawing all day for free and accepting tips of course. My friends from the Rust Belt Monster Collective will be painting a  giant group mural too, which is really neat to watch. Wedding on Saturday and then the Berea Arts Festival has hired me to draw free pictures of the attendees all day again. I think I must have drawn 500 people there last year. It’s going to be a busy weekend no doubt! After that I will be going non stop so this will probably be my last post for a long while in September. Have a great fall!

A Guy Walks Into a Bar…

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Wasting away again in Margaritaville…

So the next week I went down to Margaritaville for the first time to meet Mr. Hock’s sons Bob and Jimmy who owned the place. It was one of the better known bars in the south side and it had a lot of regulars. If ever there was a bar that was like Cheers in Pittsburgh, it is my opinion that Margaritaville was it. As bad an artist as I was at the time, they were happy to have me and the regulars were extremely friendly and generous when I started working there. The bartenders were super nice too. It was a great fit for me and there were lots of other bars nearby that I ended up drawing in as well. And so as it happened, I was going to end up drawing at Margaritaville pretty much every night for the next 5+ years.

Michelle, the kinda sexy/salty bartender in the front used to give me shit every night about this or that but I gave it right back and it was very well received. Little did I know that this prepared me for the countless hecklings I got over the years from customers… Dena, the gorgeous bartender in the front used to stand behind me while I drew and make faces at the people I was drawing. She thought the faces I made were funny so she would imitate me. She was funny and cute and I think everyone in the bar had a crush on her… She was married to a cop and all of his friends used to stop in and get caricatures too while they were there. When I was a bike messenger I would see some of them downtown while I was riding and it was pretty cool to actually stop and talk to them at lunch sometimes, which made most of my bike messenger buddies suspicious, lol.

One of the police officers was a motorcycle cop who lived in East Liberty. I remember him well. Nice guy (for a motorcycle cop anyways, it takes a certain type of sociopath to become a motorcycle cop IMO but he was pretty cool.) He had wanted a drawing as soon as I walked in the door one night and while I was drawing him, he got a call on his cell phone from someone in his precinct telling him that there was something going on at his house. There was a breakin at his house and his daughter was there alone. He left immediately and as it turns out he was being set up by one of the gangs in his district. He was a victim of some gang member initiation with the intent to kill a police officer. He was shot 16 times. I’ll never forget that. Very sad.

One of the other bartenders used to live in Key West and he told me all kinds of stories about the places he used to go down there. Sounded like a fun place!  He was a fun guy who loved a few bands that would come to the Ville on the weekends. His favorite was Brownie Mary. There were a lot of bands that would come there. Mark Eddie was a comedian who I have seen on TV since. He used to do a song called Marajuanaville that was hilarious and he added another verse to the Eric Clapton song, You Look Wonderful Tonight where the last verse ends in audible gurgling sounds. Use your imagination, lol! There was a light skinned black girl named Wendy who looked a lot like the singer Brandi. She called herself Honey Brown and her voice sounded so damned sweet and smooth. Like maple syrup. I saw a lot of blues bands too and heard Mustang Sally well past the legal limit. I completely wrecked my hearing and I am seriously going deaf! It may not be common knowledge, but Pittsburgh has quite a reputation for great blues.

It helps to flirt a lot when drawing caricatures in a bar and so it is also a pretty good way to meet the ladies as it turns out! I dated pretty frequently but the lifestyle of working in a bar and drinking lots of beer every night kinda ran it’s predictable course with all of the nice girls I brought home. The couple of relationships that held in there were lots of fun but probably not the kind you discuss in polite company and very few that you’d bring home to meet Mom… As anyone knows, flirting goes both ways and I got flashed and groped and treated like a piece of meat pretty often …and I loved every minute of it!

I noticed after a few weeks that there were some regular girls who came around a lot too and they always got a caricature. So often that after a few weeks I would just draw them for fun. We hung out after the bar closed sometimes and even though we just saw each other when I was working I considered them to be my good friends. I worked about every night of the week sometimes so it was like I saw them every day. I remember using peanut butter to get gum out of one the girl’s hair one night after she looked at the wrong girl’s boyfriend. Lol! I hung out with the kitchen staff and saw all of the shenanigan’s that happens behind the scenes at a restaurant. Used to play pool with a few of the regular guys too. Though guys my age that went to bars back then were kinda suspected of being douches and for the most part those suspicions were accurate. Lol!

Bob and Jimmy had a lot of friends who would come to the bar and visit. They were big into the Jimmy Buffet stuff so I learned a LOT of Jimmy Buffet music and about the “Parrot Head” lifestyle. The jukebox was full of it. They had a lot of oldies and classic rock. Very cool for the time. I used to put at least $10 a night into that jukebox when I was working.

Other than the times when I was working a day job like bike messengering, I used to drink till drunk every night as well. Not the thing I’m proudest of but I was having fun and making money, which was the most important thing in the world at the time… My drawings got better after a couple of beers. Everybody that knew how I normally drew commented on it actually. Which of course, firmly reinforced my bad habit. After a few though, things went downhill fast. I still somehow ended up closing the bar down about every night and working till the chairs were on the bar. I learned (and then promptly forgot) a lot about a lot of things, people, drawing, caricature in general, girls, guys, music, beer, etc… I realized at some point that it wasn’t the quality of my drawings that people tipped me for, it was the fact that I was doing them and that they were in the pictures I drew. This further reinforced my laziness and other bad habits, I would probably even have admitted this at the time. I was indifferent. Going through the motions… Stuck in a rut. 

For a time, I lived on a street where many of my friends had migrated. It wasn’t much but when I came home from work at 3am my roommate was always up to something fun and there were always at least several people hanging out playing pool, foosball, video games and music in my house or one of the houses next door where my friends lived and we partied all night till the sun came up just about every day. I shot the shit and got into the culture and even had spending money for the first time in a long time. I was popular and having the time of my life and I was receiving the social education that I had not gotten in high school. Which also reinforced that habit.

As is common with many people, my habits changed when I turned 21, then they changed again when most of my friends could get into bars. Maybe not as common, my habits changed again when a few of those friends moved on to new habits and I didn’t. I saw where that was going and I grew up a little. Instead of going to parties, we threw them. We had the parties that people wanted to go to. Small parties where everybody knew everybody. We were the big kids now. We were choosy, safe and kept out of trouble.

I’m not under the impression that this is necessarily a bad thing or uncommon at my age at the time, but it’s not what I had intended to do with my life after graduating from college. It was the lifestyle of several of the bartenders, musicians, doormen, waitresses and even many of the people who tipped me in the bars I worked at every day, true, but I freely admit that it was my goal at the time to take it to the extreme… Because I was young and I could and that’s what I though was cool. 

I realize that it was irresponsible and not good for me or anyone else. I wasted a few good years living like this. I was hard working and functional. I kept out of trouble, had a good time and lots of friends. Even a real girlfriend once in a while… I’m not proud of it, but I did learn from it and I moved on… I have even vacillated on whether or not to mention it here at all, but as it does come up a time or two and alcohol is such an integral part of my story it is worth mentioning. So there you go.

At some point in the first couple of years I worked in the south side I started getting the idea that if I really applied myself and tried to do better drawings I could do caricatures in bars for a living and make an actual business out of what I was doing. More about that next time! 😉

Copyright Adam Pate, 2013 All rights reserved.

A Guy Walks Into a Bar… Continued

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POOLS AND STREAMS

There are many different kinds of places where it is possible to do caricatures and busk other forms of novelties for tips, but the movement of the crowd almost always breaks down into 2 basic designs, -what I like to call streams and pools. A stream is a “kinetic” location where there is movement, like a busy sidewalk or a hallway of some kind when people are passing by. It is harder to approach people in a stream (from my experience) as they are moving and sometimes have their minds set on a destination, meaning you have to be eye catching or cat call to people, but it does not mean it’s impossible. It is possible sometimes to move with the crowd, get somebody interested and then stand in the flow of traffic. This is an opportunity to create what I call a “hot spot” if people slow down long enough to watch you work. (More on hot spots later.)

The most successful I have been in a stream situation is at a festival or a carnival area where I have been paid by the venue to stroll and busk for entertainment (and of course accept tips). The reason for this success I attributed to the fact that people weren’t really GOING anywhere. They were just wandering aimlessly from vender to vendor or maybe to a bathroom or beer tent. It was a captive audience of sorts. As a successful PUBLIC PROPERTY example: I have done this on Bourbon and Royal in New Orleans during Halloween (and seen other novelty artists doing so as well) and it was very well received it was also not as kinetic as some crowds (streams) as there were a lot of guests standing around looking at boobies or drinking beer because that’s what they were there for. This is ideal.

A Pool is a “stagnant” area where people are just sitting, standing or generally milling around and there is little or no reason for them to move anywhere. Cocktail parties, dinners, concerts, dance floors, food court areas, bars and nightclubs are pools. These work best because it is easy to approach people and they are more likely to be interested in some entertainment to keep the conversation lively. (For this same reason, sports bars with lots of TV’s, games like pool, golf, darts, etc… and game bars like Dave and Busters or Chuckie Cheeze aren’t as good because there’s so much going on and that’s what people are there for) It’s easy to just approach the group or individual and ask if they would like a drawing or whathaveyou in this environment. 

When scouting a private property busking location keep this in mind. Also keep in mind that if you have gone through the crowd in one location and there are no new faces, it is helpful to have a couple of alternative locations within short walking distance that you can move to and make a small route of places to visit. This will keep you busy for as long as you feel like busking especially if there is a variety of different types of establishments. If there are 2 irish bars next to one another they will probably have the same clientele and busy times, however if there is a sports bar, an upper class wine bar and a dance club on the same street they will each have a different crowd and be busy at different times of the night.

People will likely visit several establishments (bar hopping) throughout the evening, which means you have discovered your own private gigantic pool to fish from and the current of movement from place to place keeps the location lively!

Feedback is wonderful

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It’s rare when I get it. Especially when it’s very very good! This is the third thank you note she has sent to me since the wedding! 🙂 From last week’s wedding with the copier:

“Thanks again Adam! You were great! I completed the GigMasters questionnaire and gave you the highest ratings. We are so gald we hire you! I have already recommended you to a friend’s daughter.

We put the drawings into the cutest scrapbook and laughed our heads off the next day. You captured the personalities so well! Amazing. The only people you missed were the bride and groom at the reception!!”

(I drew them both multiple times but not together. They were dancing when I left and it would be a long time till they would have had time to sit together for me to draw them. I drew a studio drawing of them together so- I think they were OK with it!)