Saturday, July 16, 2016

Election 2016: Front page caricatures

I forgot to mention this.

As Production Manager at the Great Southern Weekender, I was asked to illustrate the front page of the newspaper for the 2016 federal election.

Unlike my previous election illustrations, which were produced after election day, this one was to be printed two days before Australia voted.

The challenge was how to illustrate some sort of narrative in what was widely considered a safe Liberal seat.

One issue which had surfaced during the election campaign was a preference deal struck between supposed political opponents, Labor and Liberal, arguably to the detriment of the Liberals' coalition partner, the Nationals.

My initial thought was to have the Liberal candidate Rick Wilson with his arm around his coalition colleague, Nationals' John Hassell. I would have Rick holding "Labor Preference Deal" paperwork.

The problem with this approach is that it ignored the other "major" players, specifically Labor and Greens.

So, after a bit of a rethink, I decided to illustrate the Labor and Liberal candidates as election mates with Nationals and Greens lower in the picture, just making up the numbers (and that's pretty much how the primary vote went two days later).

2016 Federal Election, O'Connor
Digital caricature ~3800x5000px
© 2016, Andy Dolphin

The candidates shown are: John Ford (Labor), Rick Wilson (Liberal), John Hassell (Nationals) with Giz Watson (Greens) almost photobombing the group.

As with my 2010 election and 2013 election front pages, all work was produced in Photoshop using a Wacom tablet.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

Bob Katter - Digital Caricature

Bob Katter
Original 1200x1400px
Digital Caricature
© Andy Dolphin

As Australia waits to find out the identity of it's next Prime Minister - the 15th in about six years, I think - one man stands out from the crowd.

Bob "Mad Hatter" Katter.

Famed for owning an Akubra for almost any occasion, Bob ventured out today and threw one of those many hats into the ring to help bring an end to the federal election count, some time before Christmas.

While some in the mainstream media have entertained the idea that Bob could become something of a kingmaker in a hung parliament, I think that after today's chat with the press he's looking more like he wants to be King.

With that in mind, I had to try a caricature of a man who is already a life-size caricature of himself.

I recently polished the drawing surface of my Wacom Intuos Pro (because I found it to be unusable with the nib-eating sandpaper surface Wacom gave it) and it is now a beautiful thing to behold... so I used that to draw the caricature on a 27" iMac and captured the action with Quicktime while I was at it.

You can watch the time-lapse caricature drawing on my Youtube channel.