George

This is a caricature I did of my friend George Parmelee.  He's an artist which I enjoy working with occasionally.  George is just a solid individual with a great personality and is very good with people which makes him a superb live caricature artist.  He also does wonderful studio work in watercolors and is currently illustrating a book which takes up a lot of his time.  He has given me some good advise in the past and I respect George a great deal.

Gift Caricature

Here is a recent gift caricature I did for a coworker just before Christmas.

Portrail final

I had the original drawing scanned but the file is too large to upload here so this is a lower resolution image taken with my digital camera.  I may have mentioned this but the lady who wanted me to do this drawing said: I can't get my entire family together all at once so this is the next best thing!

portrait progress

I thought I would share a couple of pictures taken during the process of making the portrait.  I always like to see these type of pics on other people's sites so here you are.

Caricatures at the 2011 ISCA CON

Thank you Cathy McMillan for the digital caricatures you drew of my wife and I!

Progress...

Some progress of the portrait I've been working on.

Quick Obama sketch

A quicko sketch of Obama (I saved a picture of him I liked from a glossy political mailer I received).

The butcher of Wooster

This is Adam Nussbaum from The Spoon Market in downtown Wooster, Oh.  He is the butcher.  One of his friends had me do this drawing of him as a gift.  Do you know how difficult it is to make the large slab of beef he's holding look like beef?  Heck, facial likeness is a piece of cake compared to drawing a side of beef and getting it to realistically look like raw beef.  The close-up of his face in the bottom pic was actually taken before I finished it, hence the faint neckline and the unfinished "socks" on his cap.

I received my copy of "The MAD ART of CARICATURE" by Tom Richmond today!!  This book is chock-full of high quality drawings, sketches, instructions and some MAD humor thrown in for good measure!  I'm very impressed and as far as value, Tom sure over-packed his book to give readers more content than what they paid for!  I also received an original sketch by Tom for pre-ordering the book.  The picture above is with the sketch on the right next to the page in the book where the same image appears.  Can't wait to get reading.... 

Family portrait beginings

Here are some sketches of the family portrait I'm working on.  I'm still trying to get the likeness and as much accuracy as possible in the pencil sketch phase.  I can see the guy's head in the lower right is way too big and I'll be reducing it some.  I seem to have made the heads a bit larger as I moved down the page for some reason and Ill adjust them as I progress.  

Pictureless

Getting a bunch of much needed tasks done around the lil' homestead lately so I haven't been sketching lately :(  so sad.  I'm also working on a kind of large portrait and I'm finding it very difficult to get into the zone on this one.  I'll get there!!  On some drawings it takes a little longer to get to a point where you are getting really excited about the progress and I'm not quite to that point yet on this one.

Why is it that when you have drawing commitments, thats when you come up with all kinds of other ideas for sketches and personal art projects?  Annoying human nature I guess.

Utrecht vs. Markette

I think I found the replacement for the ol' Markette marker for live caricature jobs.  A while back the manufacturer of the Markette changed the beloved nib to more of a bullet tip which did not perform nearly as well for thick and thin lines.  This left many live caricature artists scrambling to find a replacement marker.  The marker on the left is the Markette, the one in the middle is a new Utrecht design marker and the one on the right is a Utrecht after a couple hours drawing under it's belt.  I definitely can't be as heavy handed with the Utrecht as one end of it is actually a brush type marker (the other end is a chisel tip) which requires a lighter touch. So far so good!  Now if they just keep making the Utrecht marker the same for a while....

Big bully

Sometimes I get strange drawing requests.  A coworker wanted me to draw this of another coworker.  The second coworker has a great sense of humor and actually loved the drawing, much to my delight!

Here are a couple of live drawings from a recent event.  Please excuse the poor picture quality as I was using my cell phone and the lighting was less than ideal.

NY funny man!

I clip interesting photos from newspapers for reference material.  I been holding onto a picture of Jerry for a while and finally took a stab at it.

Hound ballpoint sketch

I love bic ballpoints. I also like the trusting look in the eyes of your best friend.

Laughing

Newspaper reference quick sketch.

Okay, so this corn spider was just outside our house and I HAD to get a photo of it.  The detail is amazing.  When I was a kid, my friend and I used to catch them and put 'em in jars.  Maybe I'll do a drawing of it someday.

Finished!  I can always pick out imperfections but I'm pretty happy with it.

More progress. 

I'm right handed so for pencil work I usually start at the top left of the drawing and work toward the lower right side.  This way I (try to) avoid smudging the drawing.

G-Dub

From time to time I will post pictures of stuff I've done in the past.  I thought I would post a small series of pics that shows the process of a recent drawing I did for a friend.  Please excuse the not so great quality but as you can see it started with a light sketch.

Boxer

Another digi-sketch.

One of my very first digital drawings that I did a few years ago.  I stink at drawing on a Wacom tablet but I want to get better at it.  As far as I'm concerned it's much easier drawing the old fashioned way.  I respect those artists who can create using many mediums -that's major talent!

Gator

Quick sketch of a gator.  Please excuse the photos if they are less than great quality as I don't have a good scanner at the moment.

New sketch and art blog

Hi, this is the art blog of Sam Sutton.  I'm a caricature and pencil portrait artist from Ohio.  I have loved art blogs for a few years and decided to start a blog myself.  Part of the reason is to share my sketches but also to stretch a little and just try something new.  I sincerely hope everyone that visits will get a kick out of my stuff and somehow be inspired!