Friday, June 5, 2009

Craving Kucinich



Dennis Kucinich seems to have a craving for the white house and carrots or at least carrot tops! This illustration was for another gift tee shirt at Christmas this year. I grew up hearing Kucinich's name in the news but never really new much about him. When he ran for President in 2004 I vaguely picked up that he was very left in his views, was a vegetarian and short in stature. So one of my initial doodles had him standing next to a giant carrot.

While searching for reference pictures of his portrait to caricature I kept seeing him with this stunning red head.



I was floored when I found out she was his wife! I still can't believe it. A 31 year age difference, and look at them! I thought this kind of thing only happened in the funny pages.

It was then a short (pardon the pun) jump to turning my giant carrot into a vague representation of his wife. I'm no Steve Brodner but was pretty happy with how it turned out and so was the receiver. Even though he has a distinctive elfish look about him I had a difficult time trying to figure out which aspects to exaggerate. I think I made him look too much like a game show host.

Here is what the shirt looked like when I loaded it to Zazzle. It was actually a very close representation of the final product.



I used Inkscape to create the "inked" lines using the calligraphy pen tool, which I find superior for my needs to Illustrator's equivalent brush tool. When I have more energy I'll post some tips on using it. However I colored the image in Illustrator because I find that easier to do than in Inkscape. No perfect software for me yet. Inkscape is Open Source and free by the way. I recommend trying it if you can't afford Illustrator.

Find out more about Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich. They are an interesting couple of people. Maybe there will be a made for TV movie about them someday. One can only hope.

5 comments:

Digital Scott's Illustrationblog said...

Nice illustration, and very fun read!!!

Vanessa Brantley Newton said...

What a great post and the Illustration is off the chain fabulous! Great work!!

michael robertson said...

great post!...being from cleveland, I have seen dennis on rare occasion but I have yet to see his wife. really funny idea-these t-shirts would probably go over well here!

Art Fan Ako said...

I can see why he was happy with your illustration... and wife.

Ken said...

Thanks for everyone's compliments, especially since my thumbnail on IF didn't show up for this post for some reason. It's fun to check out everyone's work and various styles.