Newyorkette about town: San Francisco
(This is a custom cartoon drawn for the event’s invitation and the poster you’ll see in the pictures below.) Click on the image to see a larger version.
Well, the hiatus was interrupted by a day and a quarter in San Francisco this past week, on a cartoonist booking for Bloomingdales’ launch of the Nike/Cole Haan shoe line! I’d prepared a bunch of shoe-themed cartoons to draw in case I wasn’t actually asked to draw portraits, but was delivered of that plan within five minutes (phew! Doing twenty cartoon portraits is far easier and more fun than drawing twenty custom cartoons! ). So, two and a half hours of portraits were punctuated by some rather nice cocktails and some delicious little hors d’oeuvres, all to the beat of a DJ who played Prince enough to make it cool. (Note that the difference between caricatures and what I do is that I draw people as they would look in one of my cartoons. Usually more attractive than a caricature!)
Here are some pictures! (Click on the images to see larger versions on flickr.com)
This lady wanted me to draw her with a thought bubble in which she’s dreaming about a new handbag.
These three are actually San Francisco branch versions of Conde Nast employees—like the Bizarro version of their New York homologues: younger, or perhaps less New Yorked out, more innocent? I think they all requested that I make their noses look smaller!
(Seems to be an obsession in SF —I noticed a lot of people I drew had the same nose!)
(And eyes, for that matter! Californians in general are more laid back socially than their New York counterparts, and, oddly enough, they seem to need the features of their face to be as unassuming as their personalities… I guess this is a rather benign, and even generous impulse, but still a little disconcerting to a mutt like me! I kept remembering that episode of the Twilight Zone, where everyone was beautiful by law.)
And here is Ben Milligan from The New Yorker (who arranged the whole trip and made sure I got there on time and in one piece). Thanks, Ben!
And thanks to Cole Haan for the free Nike Air/Cole Haan shoes! Very cute! See their link for more info about their state of the art heels (and flats, like I wore). 
