Throughout most of October and November I was working on a paperdoll book for Dover, a series of tongue in cheek caricatured dolls of most of the political figures involved in the coming election cycle. It has just gone to press, and I’ve received my sample copies from the publisher, so I suppose it is open season on finally posting a sampling of these illustrations here on this site. The ‘paper doll book’ consists of 54 dolls including Barack & Michelle Obama, members of the cabinet, Republican challengers and major news pundits, and then the same dolls were recycled again at a smaller size for a companion piece ‘sticker book’. Here is a sample of Obama’s and Newt’s doll & costumes from the book. The rest will eventually make it into my ‘portraits’ database here on the site later in the year, but for now, you’ll just have to go out and buy the book.

Also, for the sticker book, I needed to come up with a pair of scenes that the stickers could be used on, both a ‘circus tent’ scene and a ‘convention floor’ scene. The crowd was a tricky proposition, as they wanted the ‘pundits’ from the paperdoll book included in the crowd, and they would have looked odd among ‘regular looking’ people, so I ended up populating the rest of the crowd with distorted and disguised versions of the rest of the figures (some women becoming men, some men becoming women in the process). The publishers also wanted a series of ‘circus’ themed ‘props and characters’ that could also be included in the collection, so I also came up with a page of circus whatnots and gizmos. You can click on each of the illustrations below to see a larger version.