Administrators, trusted
30
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Created page with "Getting In Tune with ''Sketched Out'' by Debbie “debbo” Bumeister What happens when a caricature artist who also writes and performs his own music combines the best of..."
Getting In Tune
with ''Sketched Out''
by Debbie “debbo” Bumeister
What happens when a caricature artist who also writes and performs his own music combines the best of both of his passions? I guess it could be caricatures about music, but in Adam English’s case it was a CD of songs about drawing caricatures. These songs combine the feelings of dealing with caricature customers in a retail environment with some catchy music and lyrics.
Adam was kind enough to answer a few questions over Skype to help enlighten us on how his first caricature song CD came to be and share his thoughts on caricature and what his musical plans are for the future.
'''Debbo:''' I know you are in a band called Ookla the Mok, and I know you also do caricatures. So which came first, caricatures or music?
'''Adam:''' I started doing caricatures in 1987. I was 17 years old, and I started working for Kaman’s out at Darien Lake theme park. At that time they did not have a caricature concession, so I was their first artist. I had actually started training for portraits, which was what they had out there at the time. I met Rich Kaman on my second or third day of training. He asked how I liked it. I had just had my caricature done on a family vacation the year before, and I thought it was cool, so I said what I really wanted to do was caricatures. He had just opened not that long before, with Dino Casterline and Fred Harper, the caricature concessions at Cedar Point and Geauga Lake (theme Parks) in Ohio for Kaman’s. They wanted to open more caricature concessions. They didn’t have anyone to train me, so my mother bought me “How to Draw Caricatures” by Lenn Redman. Although that is a great book, I would not recommend it as the way to learn to draw caricatures. It took me a few years to actually get competent at it. So that is how I started drawing caricatures.
I actually started doing comedy music in about 1992, with my song-writing partner Rand Bellavia, who is my best friend and song- writing partner still to this day. We, as the “filk” rock band Ookla the Mok, perform at science fiction and comic book conventions all over the world. We’ve got six studio albums out as that.
I started doing the songs about caricatures much later. I had been performing at science fiction conventions, and we were writing comedy music about superheroes and Star Trek and so forth, and I thought, “Where can I find even a smaller audience than that?” And that is how I started writing the caricature songs. Actually, the first couple of songs I wrote were for the Kaman’s Managers conference in who knows what year, maybe 2000. Each park had to do a five-minute presentation on some aspect of the business, and they were really unspecific as to what they were looking for, so I wrote two songs. The first two songs I wrote were “Don’t Blame Me” and “I’m Gonna Draw Ya,” kind of the most obvious of the caricatures songs, I guess you might say, and I performed those at the Managers Conference that year, and people were very appreciative. And it gave me a lot of encouragement to continue writing caricature songs.
'''Debbo: Everybody always asks, “So did you go to school for this?” So … Did you go to school for drawing or did you go to school for music? [Or both?]'''
'''Adam:''' Ironically, I was an English literature major — don’t know what I was thinking — a $60K piece of toilet paper hanging on my wall. If I had known — when I started doing caricatures for a living, being a professional caricature artist — that wasn’t a thing. I had been doing this for seven years as a summer job, before it ever occurred to me, you know, I kept waiting to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up, and one day I thought, “Hey, maybe this is it!” Maybe I could figure a way to do this as a living, and I did not know one other person who did just this as a living. I know a lot of Kaman’s Art Shoppes people that did it seasonally, but they were all in the off-season trying to find a real job. So it was many years before, you know these kids now, they don’t know how good they got it. They’ve got the Internet, so in the first place, training, I mean, my God , you can hop online and look at thousands of amazing caricatures by hundreds of amazing caricature artists. And I had one book. And if you wanted another book, you had to go to the bookstore and like ask them if they had ever heard of another one. And maybe they could order it for you so you could buy it. There wasn’t a way of looking that kind of stuff up. Every time I found a book about caricatures, I would try to buy it. But before the Internet, that was a lot more difficult.
'''Debbo: So like most of us, you weren’t planning on doing caricatures full time. So you mentioned English. Did this kind of tie into your song writing?'''
'''Adam:''' Well, yeah, you know, I was going to be a writer. That was always my ambition. Songwriter is what I turned out to be. I’ve been doing caricatures for so many years that a lot of these younger artists that see my sketch say, oh, uh. They thought it would be better, I guess, because I am not as good as lot of guys these days, you know, it’s true — you can’t wave your arms without hitting 25 amazing caricature artists, and I don’t count myself among them. Although I didn’t end up making my primary living at it, the thing that I always felt I did well was write songs. I enjoy drawing caricatures a lot, and I enjoy writing songs a lot, and I wouldn’t want to give either of them up. People often ask me which one I enjoy more: I wouldn’t want to live without either of them.
'''Debbo:''' Which one of them takes up more of your time, or are they evenly split half and half?
'''Adam:''' Caricatures is what puts bread on my table. So for sure that is more of my time. Music has always been my HOBBY, and that’s not to say I haven’t made a little money at it. My claims to fame, musically speaking, include in 2002, we sold a song to Disney. It was the theme song for a Saturday morning cartoon called (Disney’s) Fillmore! That was an amazing, awesome, really cool cartoon that was on ABC from 2002 to 2004. That was an amazing experience. We got a call one day from Scott M. Gimple, and at the time he was the producer of a very hip Disney show that was in development. The interesting thing about Scott Gimple is he is now the show runner for The Walking Dead, so he did really well for himself. But at that time, we knew who he was because my songwriting partner Rand has an eidetic memory. He is a librarian
with ''Sketched Out''
by Debbie “debbo” Bumeister
What happens when a caricature artist who also writes and performs his own music combines the best of both of his passions? I guess it could be caricatures about music, but in Adam English’s case it was a CD of songs about drawing caricatures. These songs combine the feelings of dealing with caricature customers in a retail environment with some catchy music and lyrics.
Adam was kind enough to answer a few questions over Skype to help enlighten us on how his first caricature song CD came to be and share his thoughts on caricature and what his musical plans are for the future.
'''Debbo:''' I know you are in a band called Ookla the Mok, and I know you also do caricatures. So which came first, caricatures or music?
'''Adam:''' I started doing caricatures in 1987. I was 17 years old, and I started working for Kaman’s out at Darien Lake theme park. At that time they did not have a caricature concession, so I was their first artist. I had actually started training for portraits, which was what they had out there at the time. I met Rich Kaman on my second or third day of training. He asked how I liked it. I had just had my caricature done on a family vacation the year before, and I thought it was cool, so I said what I really wanted to do was caricatures. He had just opened not that long before, with Dino Casterline and Fred Harper, the caricature concessions at Cedar Point and Geauga Lake (theme Parks) in Ohio for Kaman’s. They wanted to open more caricature concessions. They didn’t have anyone to train me, so my mother bought me “How to Draw Caricatures” by Lenn Redman. Although that is a great book, I would not recommend it as the way to learn to draw caricatures. It took me a few years to actually get competent at it. So that is how I started drawing caricatures.
I actually started doing comedy music in about 1992, with my song-writing partner Rand Bellavia, who is my best friend and song- writing partner still to this day. We, as the “filk” rock band Ookla the Mok, perform at science fiction and comic book conventions all over the world. We’ve got six studio albums out as that.
I started doing the songs about caricatures much later. I had been performing at science fiction conventions, and we were writing comedy music about superheroes and Star Trek and so forth, and I thought, “Where can I find even a smaller audience than that?” And that is how I started writing the caricature songs. Actually, the first couple of songs I wrote were for the Kaman’s Managers conference in who knows what year, maybe 2000. Each park had to do a five-minute presentation on some aspect of the business, and they were really unspecific as to what they were looking for, so I wrote two songs. The first two songs I wrote were “Don’t Blame Me” and “I’m Gonna Draw Ya,” kind of the most obvious of the caricatures songs, I guess you might say, and I performed those at the Managers Conference that year, and people were very appreciative. And it gave me a lot of encouragement to continue writing caricature songs.
'''Debbo: Everybody always asks, “So did you go to school for this?” So … Did you go to school for drawing or did you go to school for music? [Or both?]'''
'''Adam:''' Ironically, I was an English literature major — don’t know what I was thinking — a $60K piece of toilet paper hanging on my wall. If I had known — when I started doing caricatures for a living, being a professional caricature artist — that wasn’t a thing. I had been doing this for seven years as a summer job, before it ever occurred to me, you know, I kept waiting to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up, and one day I thought, “Hey, maybe this is it!” Maybe I could figure a way to do this as a living, and I did not know one other person who did just this as a living. I know a lot of Kaman’s Art Shoppes people that did it seasonally, but they were all in the off-season trying to find a real job. So it was many years before, you know these kids now, they don’t know how good they got it. They’ve got the Internet, so in the first place, training, I mean, my God , you can hop online and look at thousands of amazing caricatures by hundreds of amazing caricature artists. And I had one book. And if you wanted another book, you had to go to the bookstore and like ask them if they had ever heard of another one. And maybe they could order it for you so you could buy it. There wasn’t a way of looking that kind of stuff up. Every time I found a book about caricatures, I would try to buy it. But before the Internet, that was a lot more difficult.
'''Debbo: So like most of us, you weren’t planning on doing caricatures full time. So you mentioned English. Did this kind of tie into your song writing?'''
'''Adam:''' Well, yeah, you know, I was going to be a writer. That was always my ambition. Songwriter is what I turned out to be. I’ve been doing caricatures for so many years that a lot of these younger artists that see my sketch say, oh, uh. They thought it would be better, I guess, because I am not as good as lot of guys these days, you know, it’s true — you can’t wave your arms without hitting 25 amazing caricature artists, and I don’t count myself among them. Although I didn’t end up making my primary living at it, the thing that I always felt I did well was write songs. I enjoy drawing caricatures a lot, and I enjoy writing songs a lot, and I wouldn’t want to give either of them up. People often ask me which one I enjoy more: I wouldn’t want to live without either of them.
'''Debbo:''' Which one of them takes up more of your time, or are they evenly split half and half?
'''Adam:''' Caricatures is what puts bread on my table. So for sure that is more of my time. Music has always been my HOBBY, and that’s not to say I haven’t made a little money at it. My claims to fame, musically speaking, include in 2002, we sold a song to Disney. It was the theme song for a Saturday morning cartoon called (Disney’s) Fillmore! That was an amazing, awesome, really cool cartoon that was on ABC from 2002 to 2004. That was an amazing experience. We got a call one day from Scott M. Gimple, and at the time he was the producer of a very hip Disney show that was in development. The interesting thing about Scott Gimple is he is now the show runner for The Walking Dead, so he did really well for himself. But at that time, we knew who he was because my songwriting partner Rand has an eidetic memory. He is a librarian
