Hello you avid readers of my blog! Thanks a lot to all and any of you who take the time to go onto my website to read this blog. Even if you do it occasionally it helps me with my website traffic.
Have a browse while you’re there at the caricatures in my galleries. I have some really diverse work in my galleries and you never know, you might see a caricature in a style you really love.
For this week’s blogpost I thought I’d talk about my last 11 years as a caricaturist for hire and specifically about being a caricaturist in Birmingham for the past 7 years.
I was a caricaturist at both events and on the street in both London AND Birmingham, and the differences in my experiences are revealing…
HOW IT ALL BEGAN…
My start as a caricaturist was borne out of the fact that I was an agency Teaching Assistant and the Summer was coming up. In other words, no work for a month or so!
I had completed training as an Natural History Illustrator a few years before but I was finding the work it takes to be a freelance illustrator to be lonely, tedious work.
On top of that my perfectionism meant that I would spend an inadvisably long time on any given commission.
All of those factors combined to inspire me to want to try a medium that by it’s nature was fast, and hopefully lucrative, and that’s where the notion of trying out being a caricaturist hit me.
I borrowed my Mum’s easel, construct a kind of sign/sleeve for the easel that could slot onto it, and practiced my caricature style on my more or less willing housemates using felt tip pens ‘borrowed’ from schools.
With the gumption of youth on my side I headed for Hungerford bridge, a footbridge that crosses the Thames between Embankment tube station and the Southbank centre, mostly because it was a bottleneck where I could be seen and there were no other caricaturists in that patch to intrude upon. On sunny windless days it was glorious looking out often the glistening Thames, the constant flow of people. I’d never felt more of a romantic London pride than these moments. And then, the thrill of the catch when a prospective customer would ask for a caricature!
I was charging £5 for a 5 minute caricature, £1 for a quick one, the emphasis on speed chipping away my perfectionism and honing my eye. It was fun, it was a thrill and I felt free.
It wasn’t particularly lucrative but I was earning money from my caricatures and witnessing people’s joyful reactions. One day as I was packing up a woman came up and asked me if I drew caricatures at weddings, and if I could do so at hers.
OF COURSE I said yes, and thusly I fell into my new career path; events caricaturist!
WEDDINGS
To begin with I was asked by random passersby on the bridge if I was available at events and I said yes, but realising I needed more steam behind me I soon signed up to various Events agencies who connected me up with an increasingly diverse array of events all over the UK. I would hop on a train in my fancy threads and truck all the way to rural somethingshire where a repurposed stately home full of revellers waiting for a caricature would be. I soon learned how to caricature drunken uncles that would not sit still, people with voluminous amounts of hair and beard, the lady who did’nt want her massive nose accentuated and a group of 15 teens who all wanted to be on the same page. I have to say, looking back it was a great opportunity for myself as an artist, to train my eye and improve my mark-making.
In this last 11 years I’ve been a caricaturist at weddings, but also at press junkets, corporate away days, corporate teambuilding days, Birthday parties, Leaving parties, Anniversaries, Children’s Birthday Parties, Festivals, plain old regular parties, University leavers parties, Christmas markets, School fetes, Work Christmas parties and a Bar Mitzvah.
What I really love about caricaturing at events is the fact that, unlike most artmaking, I can socialise with my subject while I make my caricatures.
I love being friendly and having a chat, and I love seeing people’s reactions even more!
BIRMINGHAM
At the time I started dating my current girlfriend and I moved up to Birmingham from London I wasn’t caricaturing that much. That changed however when we returned from a spate of travelling and I needed a way to make money FAST.
I took a blackout blind that hadn’t fitted over our window and I painted it with celebrity caricatures, and then suspended it from a camera tripod. Voila! A new and improved sign to use on the streets of Birmingham this time.
I changed my art name to Pen Jones from Ben Jones, so that people could actually find me online and I set up pitch on New street in the heart of Birmingham. I absolutely loved the return to caricature busking, and it was a great chance to chat to every single type of friendly brummie Birmingham had to offer.
Slowly but surely, as it had before in London, other types of work came out of my visibility on the street. I was asked to paint a mural in the Hyatt hotel in Broad street. I drew logos for multiple businesses. A woman who ran a stables even hired me to draw caricatures of 72 of her horses! It was a great way of networking, meeting people and mixing it up, and soon the events started rolling in too. Birmingham helped me get back to what I did the best, Caricatures and Illustration.
Three years on I have a fantastic website courtesy of Sandra Starke(contact her here if you want an excellent wesite designed- https://www.sandrastarkephotography.com/about/ ) which has helped me sell commissions from home in these dark Covidian days and now things are calming down the post-Covid events are rolling in too.
I want to thank all the friends, family and the fantastic city of Birmingham for helping me get back into this most interesting career! Let’s hope it keeps dragging me all over the UK for years to come.
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Visit https://penjones.co.uk/
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