CHAA stands for the Contemporary Humanitarian Artists Association. It was formed in 1985 “in an effort to build creativity and community for artists living and working in the region around Merced, CA. While the members have changed over the years, the goals of the collective remain constant. We come together with a shared philosophy – that creativity, contemplation, and exploration are key to the human spirit.” I’ve only been associated with these fine people for the past 6 months, but I can already feel the philosophy in my bones. Visit CHAA’s FB page to keep up with the forthcoming shows.

So what does this have to do with illustroblogging at portfoliolongo.com? Here’s the story of this group caricature of CHAA:

Several months ago CHAA met at its regular monthly time on a Tuesday evening, and we posed for a group photo:

I thought it would be fun to do a cartoon-like caricature of the group. So I cranked this out in Sketch Club, an iPad drawing app:

Sketch Club provides a variety of backgrounds and frames, and I thought it would be fun to use the Etchasketch frame, since it’s digital art and all that; plus, there may even be a few people still alive who remember what an Etchasketch is.

On the night of the group photo, of course, we realized three people were missing. So I worked with Cheryl Barnett, who administers CHAA’s Facebook page to find photos of the three missing CHAA members and to add them to the group caricature. It was an iterative process to say the least, but a fun one. I could easily show a dozen iterations. If you look closely, you’ll see some changes here and there in addition to the three additional artists. I’ll skip to one of the final drafts before I dropped it into the Etchasketch frame:

This kept me out of trouble for a while, and as you can imagine, the effort allowed me to ponder and appreciate each and every person and the group as a whole.

Technically speaking, as I mentioned, I mainly used Sketch Club on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil on this free-hand drawing. I did some occasional tweaking in iColorama and a desktop application called ON1 Photo. Sketch Club, by the way, is a lot of fun, and it was a pleasure learning about and working in it rather than Procreate, my “go to” iPad drawing app.

As usual, let me know what you think.