Robert Genn's Twice Weekly Letter
Insight and inspiration for your artistic career.

Dear Artist,

Yesterday Kerry Waghorn dropped by for lunch and a visit. Kerry is one of the world's top caricaturists--his work syndicated in more than 400 newspapers, books and other publications. You're probably familiar with his remarkable drawings of Barack Obama, John McCain, the Clintons, Celine Dion, Bruce Willis and more than 7000 other celebrities over a thirty-year career.

Likeness is a tough order. Caricatures present even more problems. Faces need to be simplified, yet personality and character still need to shine through. Working from a vast morgue of wire photos and collected reference, Kerry roughs in a general idea in "perhaps five minutes." Then he works up his drawing with woodless graphite pencils on as many as five tracing-paper overlays. Lines are found afresh and his distinctive design and personal touch forms up. When the character he wants to see appears, the top tracing is once again pencilled in, this time on Hi-Art Illustration Board (No. 62 or 79) with a rickety old homemade projector.

The final India-inking is done with both pen and brush, mostly Hunt's 102 and 104 pen. Mistakes are corrected with an electric eraser. Kerry seldom uses opaque white because of the frequent need to throw on a watercolour wash for certain publications. He releases three to five caricatures a week.

One of the examples illustrated here is a fairly complex book illustration. Here the 13 faces depicted are of no one in particular, but all are nevertheless distinct individuals. The same process has been applied, one overlay metamorphosing into another, the work appearing holistically. Multi-generational refinement contributes to design and character.

For Kerry, all this takes place in the haze of eye problems. He has had cataract surgery and lives with inferior peripheral vision and no depth perception. He uses close-to-the-side reference and works both upside down and sideways. These factors also influence his distinctive style. Working at home and alone, far from the folks who are skewered by his work--and who often try to collect it--he has developed his private methodology. "An inconvenience," says Kerry, quoting Confucius, "is an unrecognized opportunity."

Best regards,

Robert

PS: "It's ironic, but creative folks often have to deal with some sort of disadvantage. Like Oscar Peterson kept going on the piano even though he had arthritis." (Kerry Waghorn)

Esoterica: Speed is vital in the publishing game. Editors don't want to wait half an hour for a download. When Kerry completes a work, he scans it, purges noise and cleans it up in Photoshop, reduces it to two sizes--1200 dpi and 200 dpi--and sends it by tiff on FTP Fetch. Kerry works in Vancouver, B.C., and delivers to Universal Press Syndicate in Kansas City, MO. He is one artist who sells his copies and keeps his originals. Kerry is sitting on his retirement fund.

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