I seem to be stuck in caricature mode now. Here’s Jim, another of the ‘Living Room Philharmonic Orchestra’ jam buddies, and husband of my former cello teacher (#12). Seemed fitting since I’ll be heading downtown to the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts tomorrow to catch their band play (hopefully they don’t get rained out). Last year, they had a bit of bad luck when Jim broke several strings on his guitar during their first song and spent a lot of their remaining time replacing strings.
Later in the afternoon, I also did a portrait of another of the ‘LRPO’ members, Cate, who I also collaborated with on some music around 2003-5. This one I went back to basing on a photo that I found on her profile, with some minor alterations, and using a mixture of various mediums.

Long overdue for a caricature in this series of portraits, and since I’m trying to avoid taking illustrations directly from photo reference this week, it seemed like a good place to start. This is Brenda, the wife of the JJHD’s pedal steel player, and who both were members of our informal “Living Room Philharmonic Orchestra” about ten years ago (a group of musical friends who would get together once a month or so to jam, many of whom have moved on to start their own bands in the intervening years). Another of the LRPO group was #38. Today’s caricature is a little different style than the others I have done in this series, and more along the lines of the freeform style that I used for the JJHD cartoon logo.

And as long as I’m in the neighborhood, here’s Brenda’s husband Paul, in a caricature style a little more sketchy yet detailed. (Paul was also a member of the LRPO group, and is currently the pedal steel player for the Jukejoint Handmedowns (but here he is rocking his baby blue stratocaster like he did in his former band).

Also spent part of the morning working on my weekly ‘Blown Cover’ sketch. I had another of those ‘middle of the night’ ideas that turned out to be rather silly when I got up in the morning, but I couldn’t quite get it out of mind, so I went with a variation on it, figuring ‘what the heck’. I’ll post it on Friday evening once the winners have been announced.