What do you think? Does this look like me??

A toothy grin. A digital caricature from Kumar (www.cartoonistsydney.com.au)

At LearnX, B Online Learning had asked Kumar, a caricaturist to come along and draw caricatures of delegates attending the conference.

“We go to conferences and get little take aways, knick knacks but we wanted something a bit more memorable and something that you can use for a longer time and this was the perfect idea,” said Ruth McElhone (@ruthmcelhone)

It certainly was.

Vendors were were glaring at Kumar for the amount of people he had queuing up at his stand.

Now I had a bit of a dilemma.

You see, my father is an artist but he says, “people are more likely to part with $20 cash than a whole lot of money for a painting” so he draws caricatures too at local markets.  He is also a traditionalist.

The difference with Kumar was that he draws it on the iPad.  He freely waves his stylus over the iPad and gently taps the functions to change the colour, texture, line and form.  At one stage, he actually replaced his stylus and took a new one out of his shirt pocket.  That simple action made me curious. Momentarily I moved my head and he asked me to sit still.

This was not a pencil nor a brush! How can he treat it like a pencil?  I see my father toss aside pencils that are of not the highest quality which result in scratching the paper.   A pencil I can understand (as my father did explain in quite a lot of detail of how pencils are made) but a stylus is a stylus.  They’re all the same aren’t they?

So my dilemma is, do I show my father the caricature and tell him it was drawn on a new medium?

I think I’ll let sleeping dogs lie.

In all honesty, it’s a bit of fun but it is missing the ruggedness and the texture of having it hand drawn.  Dare I say it, it does look ‘flat’ with block colours.  You cannot tell the difference in colour that a slight of hand makes with a pencil does over grainy paper.

Still, it was a great idea for a laugh and it was something memorable to take away from the conference.

Kumar can be found at www.cartoonistsydney.com and for the record, he does do hand drawn caricatures too.

To top it all off, he wore EXACTLY the same Akubra hat as my father does.  Is this some trademark for caricaturists?