This family caricature featured 3 generations and the pet dog! Each family member is drawn wearing a sports t-shirt (with a little ballerina in the front!)
I’m now taking orders for August and September with limited slots available so if you’re looking for the ideal family gift get in touch today!
Happy Bloomsday! In late 2019 I was approached by Andrew Kelly of Wicklow Heather Restaurant and House in Wicklow about the use of my James Joyce caricature as part of the label design for their Bloomsday limited edition gin.
“About 10 years ago to the day we began collecting very rare books and memorabilia for our Writer’s Room which over time has turned into one of the largest collections of work of first edition Irish literature.
To celebrate the Writer’s Room we have distilled our own limited edition gin. The Gin’s name is “Bloomsday” which celebrates James Joyce in particular and his life.
When working on the label for the bottle I came across your caricature of Joyce for Bloomsday. I absolutely loved how quirky it was and instantly wanted to base our design around it.
We are producing a limited number of 200 bottles of the gin where the label will be prominent.”
It was so wonderful to be approached in this way and we worked out the details for the use of the James Joyce caricature. I think the resulting label looks great:
Anyone whose work is image-based will know how frequently other businesses will just use your work as a free stock image library so the Wicklow Heather Restaurant properly sourcing the image and working with the artist really meant a lot.
It really looks like an amazing venue and I hope to get up for a visit as things begin to normalise, and maybe even sample that gin!
Retirement Gift Caricature: this personalised caricature was a gift for a cardiac resuscitation officer in Tralee who was retiring earlier this year. It’s the second piece I’ve done for this unit in University Hospital Kerry. It’s jam-packed with references to her work and the customer gave me a well-resourced brief with lots of photo references to work from! She’s wearing a maroon V-neck scrub top with “Resuscitation Officer” written on it. She’s also got on blue nitrile hospital gloves. The caricature is set in the resuscitation room in the hospital. She has an “IO drill” in her hand and she’s fiddling with knobs of a defibrillator on a crash trolley.
This was a GAA-themed gift for the man in the middle! He’s pictured with his dog, his favourite tipple, and his club strip from St. Fechins. There’s also a bit of karoake with the lyrics from his party piece!
This personalised digital caricature was a birthday gift for a veterinary nurse! It features her and her fiance holding their pet dogs. I’ve drawn them having their favourite tipples of whiskey and gin. He’s a golfer so I’ve drawn him in vintage golf attire (always good for caricatures!) and she’s wearing her favourite dressing gown and boots! They were recently engaged so I’ve drawn her wearing a slightly larger-than-life engagement ring! As she’s a veterinary nurse I drew her wearing a nurse’s cap with a couple of paw-prints to signify her job!
My digital caricatures are just €75 and are delivered straight to your inbox by email as high resolution jpegs. Please note the image here is low-resolution for faster loading. The whole process is completely contactless, and they can be gifted digitally anywhere in the world by email, or you can print them yourself. Once you order I send you a short form to collect your details and you email me back recent high-resolution head and shoulder photos of the subjects. I do the rest! Price quoted is for up to 2 likenesses, for more people in the caricature I will need to know the details so just drop me a line with what you have in mind.
In this time of absence from each other caricatures are a delightful, thoughtful and highly-personalised gift to show someone you’re thinking of them.
Tobe Nwigwe is one of the most consistently creative artists working today, with a singular artistic vision only matched by the prolificacy of his output. He, Fat and Nell (and the kids!) have this unified aesthetic from furniture to clothing, and the Pandemic Project was an uplifting event at a time when everything was bleak. The whole family-centred approach to music and video creation is radically wholesome and is really inspirational, but there’s room for brooding and darkness in there too. I’m a bit of a fan. It’s utterly jaw-dropping how much music he’s put out in the last year. Did I mention I’m a bit of a fan?
This is a caricture portrait of Tobe Nwigwe and Fat created in Procreate for the iPad. It’s one of the first digitally-painted pieces I’ve ever done. I intend to do a series of caricature portraits to hone my digital painting. I’m quite late to the digital game so the learning curve is somewhere between a really large hoola-hoop and one of the rings of Saturn. I’m finding it a curse and a blessing, there’s huge time savings to be had but an amazing gulf conceptually between drawing on paper and drawing and painting digitally. It’s the long way to Carnagie Hall for the next while.