At the Caricature Convention!

This is going to be a rushed blog entry, as I am ticking it out on my phone between seminars and tropical drinks at the International Society of Caricature Artists 22nd (or 23rd?) annual convention! About 200 funny picture drawers have convened in St. Pete's Beach in Florida to talk shop, make fun of each other, and enjoy the bizarre, unique, and very strong comraderie that exists in this field. 

It's only the second day, so expect a more thorough rundown next week. The opening night icebreaker featured a recently added but already traditional event, the ART FIGHTS, organized by Nolan Harris and Matt Zitman. It's a wild draw-off pitting artists against one another in rapidfire heats of two-minute gag drawings judged by applause. 

That's me on the left drawing the topic "How Lorin got such a long neck" . . . I managed to win that round with a poorly drawn rendition of Lorin peeping over a nudist camp fence, and I also eeked out a victory against the talented Beejay Hawn in the semi-semi-finals, but was eliminated in the round after that (though I did get several compliments on the drawing of my opponent as an ice cream cone--his sketch of me as a plate of spaghetti was just better!)

The final winner, after many heats and many creative topics, was Tom Faraci. Along the way, he beat ISCA legend Lar deSouza in a very challenging round where they drew each other using their non-dominant hand! Fun fun stuff. I regret that in the excitement of it, and from my vantage point, I did not get any good pics of the drawings. But take my word for it, they were scribbly, crude, and made everyone laugh. 

Here's a barefoot Tom showing off his ArtFights championship belt later the next night. Though I really think it would have looked better on me, Tom did a fantastic job and folks will be gunning for him next year!
 
 

Crowd Sourcing: The Good, the Bad, and the Not-So-Innovative

Crowdsourcing. We all do it to some extent. Blasting your friends asking them en masse which plumber in town is trustworthy, whether the new blockbuster is worth seeing in 3D, or what outfit to wear. But what is crowd sourcing as a trend doing to the art business as a whole?

Better, much more prolific and respected artists than me have written on this. Stephen Silver has launched a crusade against what he defines as exploitative burglary of artists' ideas. But I recently had cause to try and see it from the other side. A friend from college announced he was crowdsourcing the design of his upcoming book on the site 99Designs.com. This friend is going to remain nameless, as I don't want to bad mouth him here but rather use him as a bellwether for the way a non-artist views (or justifies) this type of hiring model. This fellow is a very bright, articulate, well-educated man who was elected president of my graduating class at a fairly prestigious college and has since risen to prominence in politics. He served as Secretary of Technology for his state and was tapped by President Obama for his knowledge of technology as it pertains to business and public policy . . . and he saw crowdsourcing as an innovative way to get the freshest ideas from a more diverse group of designers for his book cover. He told me so when I cautioned him on a Facebook thread that crowdsourcing sites were seen as a scourge in the industry and clients who used them were sometimes hit with bad publicity and seen as exploiters. I was not a lone voice, there was one other commenter who took umbrage at our friend's decision. I'm going to quote him anonymously too: "Rather than find a more 'diverse' group of designers, you'll more likely be drawing on a more homogenous group of designers who are willing to do this type of work, and produce work that reflects putting the minimal amount of time cranking out entries into these contests rather than giving your creative brief the time, attention and process that more often yields innovative and unique design . . .  I'd respectfully ask that you reconsider the message you're sending by endorsing the platform."

Spoken like someone experienced in dealing with politicians, right? Now, I like this former classmate and respect him greatly. I do not see him as purposely being exploitative or gullible or cheap. So it provided a moment for me to really examine this type of model. Is it really so bad? If he views it as the future of design and art transaction, is he right? What would that future look like, exactly, for the typical working freelance artist? What about for the client? Maybe I should troll about the site and see if it's really so bad.

Here's a rundown of how that the project unfolded on 99Designs: For $799, he received 193 designs from 61 designers. The winning designer had submitted 10 designs. A few others had submitted as many as 15 or 16. If each design takes around one hour (and that would be incredibly fast to read over the project brief, come up with an idea, put it together on photoshop, and make it presentable as an entry), that means the client received 193 hours of work for his $799. That breaks down to $4.14 per man-hour . . . if, hypothetically, all the designers were splitting the pot. Surely the winner spent more time on his/her designs, though, after all, the quality was good enough to win payment. If the winning designer spent, say, two hours on each design, that means he/she earned $39.95 per hour. Not terrible. One might argue that $40 an hour is certainly a fair wage for an in-house designer . . . but to earn that consistently the artist would have to win EVERY contest they enter. And freelancers often charge more per hour than in-house designers, as they must pay for their own benefits and insurance and whatnot.

From the client's POV that breakdown looks fantastic. Professionals and not-so-well-known artists, anxious to please and willing to devote time and brainpower in hopes of "winning" a payment. Your own virtual art factory where artists pump out work for around half minimum wage! Well, put that way it doesn't sound great. It does sound exploitative. But clients won't see it that way unless something changes. Designs can be viewed and discarded with a click, anonymously. Artists are choosing to submit work, no one is forced. Why should anyone feel guilty? The average fair-trade-coffee-buying, anti-sweatshop, living-wage proponent would still see this model as perfectly fine--indeed, there's a sneaking tendency to see it as egalitarian, a way to "level the playing field," and find some yet undiscovered young talent who needs their big break. By golly, this is fair market! And fair markets always produce the best product. Competition makes the cream rise to the top!

Again, it's not so cut and dry. Let's now look at the designer's/artist's POV. First off, what kind of designers and artists are we looking at here? A cheerful young photo of a designer on the website states "With no real qualifications or previous clients, I had no way of gaining any income through design work previously. With 99designs, you don’t need a CV!" Wow, awesome, dude! No real qualifications needed! Rock on! The website touts several of its most prolific designers as grassroots success stories, but I am, as ever, skeptical. The numbers game here means that even the most successful participants would be spending a huge amount of time blasting off ten, or fifteen, or twenty designs for each payment they "win." (Not earn, it's not seen as earning, it's winning! Yay, you won your paycheck! How much more fun would an office job be if you didn't earn your money but instead WON it? Am I right?)

If I were to make my living (or try to win it) on crowdsourced art sites, I would want to--no, I would HAVE TO--streamline my process and go scattershot. Hit as many possible jobs with as many entries as I could crank out. And better to crank them out fast, as no one is paying per idea and the smart tactic would just be to flood the site with entries. The site itself serves as a firewall, keeping clients safe from those pesky illustrator and designer wannabes. You have limited contact with the client. Keywords and a short description serve as the fuel for the brainstorming process, though you appear to be able to send messages at some stages if you have questions. 


Also, there'd be no real impetus to come up with something innovative. My ally on the facebook thread put it well, "Most of the designs you'll receive tend to be of very poor quality and lack originality, often produced by designers who take a shotgun approach to pumping out repetitive, formulaic designs that don't match the creativity and originality you'll more likely find with a professional designer." The goal of participants is not to win a design award from peers or come up with something groundbreaking. The goal is to win payment. And that prize is awarded by someone who is themselves an amateur and not necessarily educated enough to have an eye for it. Nor can you take the time to build a client-artist relationship over the phone or in person and explain why design A is a great way to stand out but design B is hackneyed already and will look similar to every other book in the discount section. I worked at a book publisher for about a decade, and I heard stories of authors hating their book cover at first--yet the design went on to win awards, take top billing on catalogs, sell a boatload of books, and be emulated by other book designs a year later. The marketing and design departments were firmly in charge of book covers, that was stated in the contract. And the reason was pretty obvious: the author would fuck it up. Some authors preemptively sent in sketches or suggestions, and while some were okay many were laughable. A couple were passed around and, indeed, laughed at. But in the end, a good design team would save the book from bad ideas and make the author look good. In a crowdsourced model, that wouldn't happen. There's no talking a client out of a lousy idea; just make that lousy idea happen and hope you get picked. Again, I'm just extrapolating how I would go about making money on these types of sites . . . I would feel pressure to cater my entries to what an amateur eye would see as "professional." Make entries look like typical book designs on the market right now. Do not take risks. Go with templates and copycat work. Pretty much the opposite of innovation.

Okay, to add some neat visuals to this blog post, I took a look at another 99Designs project, and I SWEAR I didn't spend time looking up the worst one there. This was random--the first one I clicked on in their completed projects section. For a prize/payment of $399, a film company was asking designers to create an original movie poster for a completed feature film titled "God of Thunder." They provided links to stills of this highly original piece of cinema for reference. Twenty-five designers took the bait and came up with a total of 76 designs to choose from. Here's a handful (the winner is at the top).

That's right. In case you missed it, or just can't take your eyes off that last submission, someone just up and submitted a poorly photoshopped version of the Thor movie poster. It was among the "eliminated" entries, and it wasn't the only copied & pasted Thor poster sitting in that section. But gotta give props to the winning artist--it's not a bad job, and though clearly derivative of one of the Thor posters, to be fair the movie itself is clearly derivative of the Thor movie. I'm guessing this is an overseas copycat film, produced on a shoestring budget with B-actors and just skirting copyright enough to slide by. I've heard of those . . . and it doesn't exactly speak well of the client list that 99Designs caters to. 


What about my old classmate's book? Sorry, no pics because I'm trying to keep the author incognito--but I will say that, to my eye, the winning book cover looked pretty good. Standard, and in line with other books on the market now. However, I am not a book designer.

As part of the obligatory showing-off that must take place on
a blog, I present to you the book covers Rob & I did for
the Johns Hopkins University Press a few years ago.

A few years back, Robert and I produced two illustrations that were used as book covers, but these drawings were placed in the deft hands of skilled, experienced designers who incorporated their knowledge of book design trends, composition, materials, textures, and available inks to really knock it out of the park. I doubt any of the jpgs submitted to 99Designs came with specs for the printer to use a particular paper, metallic ink, or spot-gloss.

How can we bridge the gap here and "fix" the crowd source model? Can it be fixed? Should it be? Technology isn't going away. People aren't going to magically start wanting what they perceive as "less bang for the buck." If an online way to get free ideas exists, people will use it. And there will never be a shortage of folks willing to work for free. Tom Sawyer today would find plenty of suckers to paint his fence for him--for exposure! But if a few tweaks can be made, and if other models can be popularized, maybe in time the landscape will in fact be ripe for innovation, fair trade practices, and good client-artist relations. What can we do?

Kill the Contest Model

This is the model most reviled (and rightly so) by art activists like Steve Silver. A huge company or successful band puts out a call for entries and offers a chance to design the new T-shirt/album/commercial print ad, etc, and win some sort of prize or a chance at that elusive holy grail: "exposure." A few lines of legalese explain that all entries, even the ones that don't win, become the sole property of the sponsor of the contest, and they immediately own the rights to all the ideas, even if they decide not to award the prize. That's about it, basically they ask the world to give them ideas and art for free, and the world does. Mr. Silver has shamed a few companies putting on these types of campaigns, and he has used his popular blog and Facebook page to rally other professionals to flood these contests with bogus (laughably awful) entries or skew voting if the contest is based on popularity. It must have been embarrassing for contest site Talenthouse when one of the most popular designs in the contest they ran for Linkin Park ended up being a scribbly caricature of the band with the words "Linkin Park: Give us your ideas and we'll give you shit!" Indeed, Mr. Silver did receive a response and got to air his grievances with a representative of the company. Whether such guerilla tactics will work in the long run has yet to be seen, but when applied surgically I think they can make a difference. There is a place for such contests: who doesn't enjoy seeing a band's "biggest fan" being crowned based on a quirky video they made showcasing their collection? Contests like that are fun, and they are clearly aimed at an amateur crowd. If a large, successful company simply wants to avoid paying a professional designer for a job that requires one? Well, that's just shitty. And why stop there? Hold a contest to see who will landscape the record company's offices the best, and give the winning landscaper "exposure" or some free swag. Don't pay an accounting department, just open it up to math students as a contest and hope they get your company's taxes done right in exchange for some free T-shirts. Sound ridiculously cheap and even dangerous to a company's reputation? Hopefully design contests like this will indeed be seen as tarnishing a company's reputation. Follow Steve Silver's lead and do what you can to help kill them off.

Support Models You Want to Survive
There are other art-farming sites out there, in fact there are a truckload of them. The ones that become popular will survive, the ones that get ignored will disappear. I have only spent a short time browsing and discovered a few. Likely there will be others popping up next week. Freelancer.com looks very similar to 99Designs.com, but in addition to the contest model it looks like they try to also offer a service to connect clients with professionals who hire out at set hourly rates. Freelancer also includes professions such as writing, editing, translating, and marketing. The very similarly-named Freelanced.com offers itself up as a social networking hybrid site, where you can follow other freelancers, post your portfolio and bio, and choose different projects to bid on. The projects there seem to vary wildly, from clients that sound like 13-year-olds ("Design my fantasy book cover, featuring a knight killing a dragon, for $25") to clients that sound rather professional, offering a few thousand dollars for graphic novel work. But at least none of the projects are set up as a crowdsourced contest asking for free spec work. Check out all the sites out there offering professional-to-client service models. Sign up for ones you like, and weed out the ones that are exploitative. In fact, complain to the ones who are exploitative and give them suggestions on how they must change before professionals like you will take them seriously. If you get snarky "we-care-nothing-about-you-unless-you-work-for-free" replies from their management, spread that message far and wide on social media.   

Demand Client-Artist Relationships over Anonymity

Sites that do not list their artists by name and portfolio are no place to build a reputation. The age of meeting every client over coffee and shaking hands before accepting a project are long gone--but if a third-party website wants to reduce you to a short nickname or a number, that's a good hint on how you'll be treated. You know that homeless cleaning off windshields downtown? . . . Well that guy has a business advantage over you if you put your trust in anonymous design-farming sites. That homeless guy looks every one of his potential clients in the eye. It's human contact that reminds someone that another person is providing a service. Call it guilt-tripping if you want, but the guy gets paid in large part because of eye contact. There is no human contact in down-voting dozens of anonymous numbered entries. Look for personal touches in any artist-to-client model: a place to put a photo of yourself, a short bio, a list of prior satisfied clients and the work you have done. It makes you a real human being, one that is doing real work. We are actually at a disadvantage in that our work can be done silently, away from the client. I doubt anyone would be comfortable with a crowdsourced chef service: can you imagine having a chef come to your home, spend an hour cooking a meal, then, after one bite, telling that professional "This is nice but I think I'll pass--there are a dozen other cooks I've called and the next one will be here shortly. One of them will get paid." No, that would be unthinkable, right?! But if it's an anonymous click of a mouse, who cares? 

Educate Colleagues and Clients 

Really, I guess I'm trying to do that now, with this blog post. Just like I and that other Facebook commenter were trying to do that by commenting on a politician's Facebook page. These sites rely on getting business from those seeking "innovative" art AND on a steady stream of young artists and designers willing to do work they likely won't get paid for. It seems a zero-sum game that might resolve itself over time: any artists who get proficient, develop a strong portfolio, and start to value their time will naturally fall away from crowdsourced models. This will take a toll on the quality of work clients can expect from such sites (which already seems rife with some lackluster material--e.g., some of those God of Thunder images above). I believe that helping this process along is worth doing. Warn students and hobbyists you know that such sites might seem fun to try out, but participants are simply giving away time, skill, and ideas. Redirect them to sites that better approximate a fair client-professional relationship. Clients will feel justified that they get to choose the "best" work available on such a model, but they, too, should be warned that they will be skimming the cream off a vat that has already been thoroughly skimmed.

If You Still Want to Work for Free, Do It Selectively

If you really want to do some free work and feel like you're at a point where you could use the practice and experience, do it! BUT . . . there isn't any need for you to offer your services to clients on freelance models that are exploitative in their nature. Even if you are fine being exploited, by contributing to these sites you help them survive and exploit others. Instead, why not produce some fine fan art honoring your favorite show or movie, then post it on DeviantArt and get some geek love from other fans. Or offer your time and talents to help design something for a local charity. Get connected via Facebook or other social media with causes that you believe in, and tell them you are willing to donate your services. Not only will you get real exposure and appreciation this way, but you will be doing real, meaningful work that helps people who really need it. That feels way better than trying to "win" payment from a client that sought out crowdsourced art.


Want to read more on spec work and why artists should be paid for it? The American Institute of Graphic Arts has a great position letter about that topic here. Also, it's a great place to send clients who are insisting that you work for free. 

Caricaturing by Lantern in a Blackout . . . on a Mountain!

I worked a very interesting wedding gig yesterday. It was a bit of a drive up Mt. Charleston to the popular Mt. Charleston Lodge, where the couple had planned a rustic wedding reception in the chilly mountain air. I've worked up there before, but little did I know this would be a first for me. Here's the view during the daytime at the lodge . . .

Pretty, right? Well the sun was going down as I drove up the mountain, as I was booked for 6-8pm and was part of the evening entertainment. Everything was going well, the DJ was playing hits and folks were dancing, while I drew busily in a corner off the dance floor, when POP . . . the lights flickered a bit and then went out completely. The music went silent. Someone screamed, and the room was filled with that weird energy you feel when you're part of a semi-emergency in an unfamiliar place.

I was almost done with a double, so I whipped out my cell phone and tried to get some light from it to see my model and then see my paper. That didn't work well. But soon enough the management from the lodge had some battery-operated lanterns placed around the dining area and those lit it up the area passably.

Just passably! The guests were now firmly on my side, ready to help me out, and moved the lanterns back and forth to try and find the best configuration so I could see properly but not get blinded. The crowd just formed a little horseshoe behind me and watched me draw, like the olden days I guess. The cake was brought out and shots were passed around. And guests seemed pretty upbeat about the whole thing. One relative remarked that it was the deceased grandparents' way of attending the wedding and pulling a prank. The bride said that she knew no one would forget her wedding now (she described herself as the opposite of a "bridezilla," and she certainly seemed to be down-to-earth). Both the bride and groom had worked in the service industry--they said they met while working at a sandwich shop--and I swear, that just makes for nice people. Once you have to deal with the public, you get a whole lot more understanding about stuff in general. There's only so much human beings have control over, and once you work in customer service, you realize that.

The staff came out and alerted everyone that power was out on the whole mountain, and they said this happens quite a lot. Just a hazard of working on the mountain. Unfortunately, they also said it would probably be off all night. So, no lights and no more DJ music. The father of the bride didn't get his father-daughter dance, and I felt bad for the guy. Though the bride and groom were taking the sudden interruption of their celebration like champs, they did chafe a bit at the fact that the venue hadn't mentioned the whole frequent-long-lasting-blackouts thing to them when they booked their reception. Yeah, that would have been nice to disclose.

Well, I kept on drawing and was now the only entertainment . . . I ended up drawing everyone there, and folks were so nice and having fun with the whole situation. I noticed everyone's pupils were so large when one draws in the dark, and the couple I was drawing said "Nah, we're just coked out of our minds" and giggled. The bride thanked me for being okay with the circumstances, and I assured her it was my job to make them happy, not their job to make me happy. You gotta roll with the punches. I was just sad I no longer carried a battery-operated lantern in my trunk! I used to! But the lodge had them aplenty, at least. The bride hugged me, said it meant a lot to her that I was undaunted, and added "I saw you trying to draw off the light from your phone! That's dedication!" She sent me off with my payment, plus a little extra, PLUS some cool wedding table gifts they had extras of. An autumn-leaf wine topper and two little scented soaps. Adorable.

Leaving was a little scary . . . mountain dark is definitely different than city dark. No light pollution, just dark sky and dark ground. I had to use my cell phone to guide me through the hallway out and then the small parking lot to my car. On the hour-long drive back down to Vegas, I was so glad to have powerful headlights! And I'm going to start bringing that battery-operated light I own, as a backup for my corded lights, juuuuust in case.

A Story about Reproduction Rights

Well, my second blog post and I'm not even telling my own story. But this is one I've been wanting to share. It's a good story. It happened to my husband and has entertained and educated many folks over the years. It touches on the importance of knowing about reproduction rights, and (like most good stories), it also involves a large hairy naked man. This naked man, in specific.

This is an alternative cupid that Rob drew years before I even met him, for a cover of Las Vegas City Life. They had asked for a Valentine’s Day cupid that was not the typical cute chubby baby type. They wanted it to be "an alternative cupid." Rob delivered. Shortly after it came out, Rob got a phone call from someone interested in reprinting the image. Now, he doesn’t remember signing any contract for this piece, and terms for rights were never discussed with the editor (I guess the LV City Life was run a bit more casually in those days), so he didn’t see anything wrong with granting whatever requests he got for reproduction.

Nor did he see any value in it, or any reason to formalize the request with paperwork. Like many of us, he was just tickled that someone out there had noticed it. 

  

The way Rob tells the story, the guy on the phone was vague but said he ran a nonprofit gay rights newsletter out of the Bay area and was hoping to reprint the illustration.  Rob said “sure, just send me a copy once it’s out.” He gave the fellow his address and that was that. No fee was discussed, no further questions were asked, not even a handshake. Just a shrug, a "sure" and that's that. 

Some weeks later,  a nice little package arrives, and Rob opens it up. It’s a glossy publication called “BEAR Magazine” (google that if you dare) and on the front is a large, bearded man in flannel and denim posing seductively with the caption “Would you like to make this lumberjack smile?”  A post-it note on the magazine said “Your art is on page 41, thanks!”

Rob flipped open the magazine to what turned out to be the centerfold and found that same lumberjack, without the flannel or the denim, on his back and holding his legs open as he smiled at the camera. Rob says that after that eyeful, he gingerly turned pages by the corner, trying to just see the page numbers and nothing more. He arrived to a section on page 41 titled “Fan Art” and found his illustration labeled with his name and city of residence. It was just above a poorly drawn image of a man fellating a Minotaur.

Not exactly a gay rights newsletter. As Rob says, "There's a difference between supporting gay rights and seeing some dude's asshole."

Now, I am much more a fan of husky naked men than is my husband. There is nothing wrong with liking husky naked men. But not everyone wants their name and city of residence posted in a magazine of this type. Rob honestly found the situation kind of funny, being labeled a bear fan . . . and obviously he's not embarrassed about it, as he's okay with his wife telling her dozens and dozens of readers out there about it on this blog. But he felt lied to, and he regretted that he didn't ask more questions or discuss a reprint fee. Not touching on those subjects does tend to relegate one to the "amateur" status, and where does amateur art end up? On a "fan art" page. In this case, next to a drawing of a guy pleasuring a Minotaur. 

We certainly cannot claim to run a perfectly ship-shape formal business. Lord knows I often do things on the casual side, and I've done plenty of smaller jobs without a contract. But asking a few basic questions can at least give you the APPEARANCE of running a professional business. What is the circulation of your publication? How will the illustration be used? What size will you be reproducing it at? These questions could help you figure out a fair price to ask for nonexclusive reproduction rights. And you should ask for a price. If someone valued your work enough to contact you, they value it enough to pay a small fee (or not-so-small fee) to legally use it. Are they claiming to be a charity? Ask for a form allowing you to claim your typical reprint fee as a tax write-off. Get a look at their website, inquire about their 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. 

And reproduction rights can really pay off sometimes. One of the first jobs Robert and I did together was a cartoon map of the Las Vegas Strip, and it was a peculiar negotiation. We were intrigued by the job, but the magazine (a smaller Spanish-print guidebook that came out monthly) did not have a huge surplus of cash on hand. What they did have, however, was a month-to-month budget that allowed them to cover costs for the production. Rather than laugh at the sum they offered initially, I convinced them that it would be in both our interests to put more time into a really nice cartoon map . . . and if they couldn't pay for it now, how about Robert and I do the job but not as a work-for-hire (an exclusive thing just for them). We would reserve the right to sell the image to other parties, and we could simply charge them a fee each time they reprinted it. So we drew up a contract and poured our time into a piece we considered a portfolio item that we might shop around later. In the end we made twice as much as we would have earned had we charged them a fair rate for a work-for-hire, AND the deal was sweeter to them because they had the budget to rent but not build from scratch. Our pay just came in $50 checks each month. 

Now, if you want to educate yourself more about what constitutes a fair price, and how to figure one out, there are loads of sources out there. 

Number one to consult is The Graphic Artists' Guild Handbook

The GAG also has a bunch of online tools you can read through just to get a quick understanding of the law and how it works for folks like us. This intro to copyright law is a quick read and not full of jargon. What about the jargon, you ask? Well this glossary of contract terms will help you understand contracts AND sound smart about such things when you talk with clients. Happy reading, and stay off the fan art pages!

Just got back from the State Fair of Texas!

Well, I'm starting this blog with a promise. I will have a post every Tuesday. Most of the time it will be about caricatures, or cartoon art, or something related to this crazy field I'm lucky enough to work in. But I can't promise some other unrelated musings won't pop in.

As I sit here, catching up on Walking Dead via Netflix, I am decompressing from a 24-day stint at the State Fair of Texas. And it took everything out of me. I joke around with soldiers that working a fair is kind of like a tour-of-duty, without all that bothersome business of getting shot at. And I'm not really serious, of course, but you do get into a weird mindset. A coworker called it almost Stockholm-syndrome-like . . . you want the fair to be over, but then once it is, you see the little community you've lived in for the past couple weeks, or (in the case of Texas) the past month, just up and disappear. Transient, all of it. I'm home now, but still feel groggy, like I'm coming out of stasis.

The adrenalyne level the last weekend of a fair is always frenetic. In this case, with Texas being rainy 3 out of the 4 weekends of the fair, that last weekend was packed beyond reason. And our earning potential was really just dependent on how many we could crank out. I've never wanted to be a caricature stamp-machine churning out 30-second cute blah drawings with a fake smile on my face, but I have at least pushed myself to a few new levels of speed with each day like that (and believe me, they are few and far between in this business; no one gets nonstop customers EVERY day at work). I may not be in the big leagues of guys who can do $1800 in a day without breaking a sweat, but I'm edging into that territory. That last Sunday I cranked out 54 color faces and several black and white faces. And toward the last hour, I heard a kid in line yell out "Eleven minutes for a color double!" after I finished the couple I was working on. Airbrushing caricatures in a retail environment is a different game than whipping out party caricatures, so I kind of surprised myself at how many I squeezed in that last weekend.

But wow, I sound like I'm just bragging. But before I end the bragging, um, let me throw in a couple photos (the only pics I took during that last day at the fair, as once it gets crazy busy I kind of leave the phone in my pocket).

My point is that you really do get into a "zone" of sorts on days like that, and as the tally sheet clicks along, you draw and draw and draw and draw. Moments of "ugh, I can't draw another one," or "ugh, I hope that screaming baby doesn't end up in my chair" go through your head, but you push them aside and just focus on the most important things: Can I make it through a few more without a pee break? Still have some beverage in my cup? Mosquitoes biting or can I go a few more without slathering on some repellant? Oh yeah . . . and What does the person in front of me look like? Hi there, person, let's have a quasi-meaningful exchange of pleasantries as I draw a funny picture of you and then you pay me! Done! Next person . . . and on it goes. You mind shuts off some of its sectors, focusing energy on just what you need to get the job done. You know this is your chance, your perfect storm, to haul in as many fish as you can to last you the winter, so to speak. Whatever you can earn and bring back will have to pay your bills for a while.

You develop a quick bond with your coworkers and campermates. We are lucky enough to all get along well, and I've been working with the same crew in Texas for six years now. Two guys and two girls, all interacting like we're quite familiar with one another, it's funny how people assume we are two married couples (which ones are married to which just depends on who's sitting near whom).

With 24 days in a row of 12-hour workdays (sometimes longer), it's amazing how you cherish your off-time. The precious couple hours after we shut down and walk back to the camper feel wonderful. Remember that feeling you got when the recess bell rang and you jumped up from your desk to head to the playground? Yeah, it feels like that. Except you're old and tired and instead of a playground you look forward to pizza delivery and a shower and hitting your bunk. Chit-chatting with your fellow artists on the walk back, texting your family, checking the internet. Precious, wonderful sleep, albeit on a stiff travel mattress in a camper that always seems too cold at night. You dream, but it's often fleeting little dreams about drawing people, lines and lines of people who are fussing about having to wait. Then you wake up and again it goes the next day, and the next.

Until you're finally on a plane and touch down back home. Wonderful, familiar-yet-strangely-new home, where you feel kind of weird acclimating to that regular life you left behind. So you watch some Walking Dead and snuggle with your husband (the real one, not one of the coworkers that folks just assumed was your husband) and type out a blog post.

Testing the blogosphere waters... one, two, three, hope this works, fiddle dee dee...