Imagine my surprise when I walked into a Bar Mitzvah last weekend and everybody (except me) was wearing sweats and jeans. The nightime celebrations were at a local Y - 'til midnight! The guests swam and played baseball in between eating and getting drawn.

It was a whirlwind for me. Not only because I expected it to be a dress-up occasion. But also because, surprise again, I didn't know ahead of time that they expected body/hobby. No time to 'learn my lines'.

Let's see what came out of me under those circumstances. It's so interesting to me that this is real art. That my performance is affected by circumstances and emotions. Well, surprised, didn't know what I drew until 'the morning after' (when I saw these photos), and we all had a good time:

It worked! Yesterday's studying worked!

Here are some photos from last night. I applied yesterday's studying - the couples were done with the amorphic shape principle. I also like the dark outline that I used to bring the two people together as 'one' shape:

We can compare them with some other pictures that I created recently - just about a week ago. I like these pictures too, but I prefer the new stuff that I did with amorphic shapes for couples. Here are last the pictures that I made before yesterday's studying:

Once again, I've found that you don't know what you're going to learn until you go through the studying.

You don't know what you're going to experience until you go there.

Art is Life.

Tonight I'll be working at a Sweet 16 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Sweet 16. What will that be like? I've worked at many Sweet 16's. From my experience, I'd say that That means Couples. Not my favoriate thing to do.

But there's nothing like studying to make me look forward to the experience. Because if I study, I'll be working out a problem, an idea. So I'll look forward to using what I studied.

The first thing I did was to draw some couples directly. I wanted to remember to overlap them. And I decided that tonight, I'd either want them looking directly at me or both looking to the same side. Looking directly at me is the easiest for me - I don't need much more than an oval with an X for a predraw:

I've been wanting to work on my 3/4 views for 3-dimensionality, so I practiced that too (more of a predraw - if I do it enough, I won't need it so much):

Then I remembered something that I love to do. When it jumps out at me and I see how I can wrap thge 2nd person's face in the leftover space of the first person. This is most likely to happen when someone has a very long thin face.

But I decided to just make it happen for me. By drawing the 2nd person as an amorphic shape:

Ick. Something I didn't like about that. So I decided to make then BOTH from amorphic shapes! That came out real cool. Real 'caricatureeeee':

And I'm off! About to go have some fun at Alana's Sweet 16. Parties can be what we make them to be. Life can be what we make it be. Parties, Life, School, can be fun, interesting, boring, scary, magical..... We can choose to change our experience if we don't like the one we're in.

Here's a blast from the past. Cleaning off my desk, trying to do something with all those pictures I had thought were so important when I took them, I came across these photos of the very first Giant Caricatures I had made. Years ago when I first designed this idea:

BTW, I love making these Giant Caricatures, but I took them off my lists of information that I give to people who are planning Parties. Because it's just too hard to carry 22x28 papers around so often. But if you find this post, I hope you'll ask me about doing Giant Caricatures at your Party. For the few people who find out about them, I am glad to do them.