22 Ways to Draw Obama Caricatures

Politicians aren't more than humans like you and me (despite all the things we will say), but cartoonists know well the potential that exists in someone's countenance, their facial features and the way they speak. As Daryl Cagle, political cartoonist notes on an article in The Moderate Voice;

''When Obama burst into the presidential campaign cartoonists started drawing him as a caricature without much exaggeration. As time goes by, political figures morph in cartoons into caricatures of caricatures; George W. Bush shrank to knee height and grew huge bunny ears; Bill Clinton lost his pants and grew fatter (even as he got skinnier in real life). At the beginning of the Obama administration, everyone is watching to see how the cartoon Obama evolves.''

A cartoonist's job can be seen pretty much as that, they forge an alter-ego for whoever they draw (well, it's a lot more than that but hey!). And I noticed, that in Obama's case, sometimes the cartoons don't even remotely look like him, yet, and somehow, we still recognise them as him! How's that? Some are even contradictory, he has massive ears and tiny nose in one, and the other way round in another! I invite you to see 22 ways in which I've seen 'Bama being drawn:


And now, after showing you the wide gamut of Obamas that have been conceived, I show you my more or less moderate depiction of him I used in a silly comic:


Obama Gets Some Help by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

Madrugal

I was listening to Café Tacuba the other day when a seemingly innocent and inconspicuous bolero-style song in their 2nd album, Re, which caught my ears. Not because of the intricate and smooth guitar, or the sweet voices that are complemented by it, but by the last line of the song. Overall it's a jab at pollution in Mexico city, using irony. Here's the song in the original and also my translation:



La ciudad de los palacios

The city of palaces

Va dejando paso a el alba

Gives way to dawn

Se va perdiendo la calma

Calm recedes

Para cuando el sol asoma

By the time the sun peeps

Todo el esplendor decrece

All the splendour diminishes

la gente en las calles toma

people in the streets drink

Catedral desaparece entre smog

(the) cathedral dissapears among smog

Y caca de paloma.

and pidgeon shit.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

What an awesome way to end the song, eh?

Now, 'Madrugal' probably means 'Morning Song' or something. What happens is that it's not really a word, and after searching around for the definition, the closest thing I found was the Italian term, madrigal. According to the Free Online Dictionary, madrigal means the following:

1. a. A song for two or three unaccompanied voices, developed in Italy in the late 13th and early 14th centuries.

b. A short poem, often about love, suitable for being set to music.

2. b. A part song.

A portmanteau (word made out of two different words), perhaps? I quite like the idea, a short morning poem sung by polyphonic voices, set to music. Although, it strikes to me as some kind of prose really similar to what a haiku would be. EDIT: (Thank you, pla, you are right, it's more senryu actually!). After all, it's a 'show, not tell' kind of thing, it paints a vivid image in the mind of the reader/listener and with just a few words it can do a lot. Of course this is 4 lines a stanza, but I think the parallels are interesting!

Learnin' to paint faces

Radiate by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART
I've been trying around different painting programs and so far my two favourite are Paint Tool SAI and Corel Painter X. Paint Tool is simple yet versatile and fast, while Painter X is quite realistic and if used properly can be quite powerful.
Here's a progress animation on how I painted this thing: (you'll notice I started three times, I tried in Corel twice and gave up, then went to SAI and I felt it was better to start there. However, I changed my approach and started with a black and white thing first.)

Beware: it begins okay and gets ugly from there. Making art can sometimes be like making sausages, it's ugly, specially when you are just learning how to.

Football Predictions

I dunno, I was just curious about how accurate I could pull this off. Lets see how many of these hold true tomorrow and after tomorrow.


Going horizontally: Netherlands, Paraguay, Italy, Japan, Brazil and Portugal. There's still lots to guess about the last two spots so I put nothing there.

EDIT (3 days later): seems I got all the teams, except for Italy. Wow. That's the thing about predictions, it's always easier to get something apparently obvious wrong. Now, the last 2; 1H and 2H were left blank because I had the feeling that anything could happen. Chile almost didn't get through and Spain didn't end in 2nd place. Damn.

One thing to have in mind when predicting is to have in mind that although we know many things are possible, we must still not think of the future as a predetermined state. When in movies people travel to the future, it's a future that is already set and can't change unless the past is changed. It's all clouds of probability. I'll post something about that one day.

Everybody Way Oh!

''Curiosity about how reality works is one of the finest things about humanity.''
- Greta Christina

How's it crackin'? Personally, I don't think there's a perfect way to begin a first post. Greetings? Hello world? To me that's all cliché, but there has to be a first impression. Or not.

Why is this place called 'Everybody Way Oh!'? Well, I was listening to a song that was called that, and it seemed a good name. I don't know. It's a really weird but catchy tune...

So what's Everybody Way Oh! gonna be about? Well..

I'm just a dude who has a passion for arts in general. That means that I love making music, and painting and animating and a whole array of things in between. Multimedia audiovisual experiences.

I am getting ready to study multimedia design and engineering, somewhere that might be in the UK or Australia, and I'm eager to face the world! Everybody Way Oh!

Things that make me click are usually weird, unusual, unthought of, or obscure. Yeah, I'm a bit zany and I love to see the humour in life. But also the wonderful and beautiful.

So what will this blog offer? Why should you come back again someday? Or subscribe? Maybe that's something you should decide on a hunch, but lets just hope you enjoy whatever pops into existence out of quantum fields. Until then, here's the song that I can't get out of my head, no matter how hard it is to sing along with it:



Oh, and I leave you with Jeremy, who will have a few things to say now and then: