But the summer months were ever so slow. And yet before we knew it, along came Autumn, and as longs weeks of turning out leaving gifts drifted by, I quickly realised that I wouldn’t stay sane if I just kept making caricatures from home. I’d have to get an office.

Fortunately my girlfriend Helga is computer literate, unlike me. So she briefly surfed the web and found me an option: a new office space in Clapham that looked like it would do the job. So I quickly put all my caricature yourself kit (a computer, and some poster tubes) in a box, and moved over there. I was unsurprisingly the only caricatures company in the building, and also the only leaving gifts company in the building, which was fun. And it was a start-up environment where we all enjoyed sharing ideas: “You could caricature yourself and stick the image on a body template! You could caricature yourself and make mugs and tshirts!” the ideas would flow in, and they were most welcome!

So unsurprisingly it all felt a great deal more dynamic, and my caricatures business doubled its intake almost overnight, as I strived rigorously 9am to 7pm daily (at least), pursuing every avenue that could generate orders for leaving gifts… and now, since the Big Egg hunt, I’m over in Clerkenwell… and it finally looks like my business might be profitable!

not caricature yourself!

Seriously I actually said caricature yourself to my cartoonists. Why? Because I needed caricatures of them for the website. And why don’t I have them now? Because thankfully, we got busy again, shortly after that little crisis.

Caricatures from photos are tough to make when the photos aren’t flowing in. So yes, last april/may, we were facing a shortage of leaving gifts orders. So I cut down on all our costs, worked from home and we worked on a sort of “hibernation mode”, doing caricatures from photos if and when they were commissioned. In the summer, I guess our leaving gifts business wasn’t helped by the fact that I went off on holiday for four weeks. But then, it was most definitely worth it! Leaving caricatures far behind, my girlfriend and I went on a big wildlife tour of Sulawesi Indeonedia, about 10,000 miles away from the nearest caricatures from photos. It was welcome relief, but caricatures from photos don’t just draw themselves, and by the time we got back, despite my deputy caricatures manager Jane’s best efforts… we’d hit rock bottom order-wise!

What a shame we couldn’t just get by from selling caricatures from photos we had taken on our holiday. There would have been enough to keep a business going for years, given my girlfriend’s trigger happy photo taking habits…

Downton Abbey

I was filming season three of Downton Abbey in March, which was a great laugh. Over to Highclere castle to film with Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville etc… Beautiful sets, costumes, the lot… and then when back at the hotel in the evening, I open up the laptop, log on to my Charlie’s Cartoons email account, and work my way through a day’s worth of customer requests and cartoonist checks while munching on a room service sandwich! Not a very relaxing thing to be launching a business and a TV career in the same breath, but it’s a hell of a rush – in every sense!

Today, for instance, I was working on a slightly less glamorous but very fun production, Dark Matters for the Discovery Channel. The studio where it’s being filmed is a big blue screen hangar in Battersea, a skip and a jump from my house, so that was rather convenient. Now usually when I’m involved in something big acting-wise I’ll hand over the day-to-day reins of the business to my deputy manager Jane, but this time was too short-notice to sort out a handover… So I had to manage the business and film over the same 4 day period!

I set up camp in the green room once I’d been through costume hair and make-up – I was playing young Einstein in the year 1920, so had a big fat moustache and explosive hair – and logged in to my email account. And got through the work between scenes. So-and-so requesting a tracking code for their cartoon, a cartoonist asking for my opinion on a likeness… I did it all while sipping a cup of tea through a bushy fake moustache…

Just another day at the office.

Charlies Cartoons:
Our caricatures from photos are the answer for everything from weddings and anniversaries to birthdays and leaving dos.

Now I’m not really sure I would buy that! Caricatures are unknown quantities, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to shell out, you’re going to want a minimum of proof that what you’re buying is on target! After all, you want to caricature yourself, not someone who looks a bit like you! So I only ask for a deposit up front – you pay for the rest once you’ve approved the draft and seen the final caricatures as a copy.

But then I guess that with a one off payment comes a good deal of ease. There’s no convoluted process, just a payment, a photo upload, and then you’re guaranteed satisfaction on the delivered product. Sounds good to me!

But this will only work for low degrees of personalisation. If you want to caricature yourself for a tshirt, or caricature yourself and your partner for a mug or a framed print, then the cheap, one off payment solution works well. But if you want sophisticated, hand-made caricatures from photos, you’re going to expect more gurantees than that. The degree of uncertaintly goes hand in hand with the degree of persoanlisation. By making caricatures from photos that are extra personalised, I’ve opened up a big can of worms: How do you get customers to trust your judgment from the go? Is there a fully reliable way to caricature yourself?

So now it looks like hand-painted leaving gifts isn’t going to be the only thing on the menu! Up until now I’ve always had a bit of an aversion from selling digitally made leaving gifts, but it’s time to put away that hang-up. After all, at the moment, about 70% of people who visit my site for the first time leave the site because the caricatures from photos are too expensive for them. Those who do go ahead with the service are thrilled with the result, but it has to be for an occasion that matches the investment. Producing caricatures from photos of people as leaving gifts is a wonderful thing to do, but you’re not going to throw in £130+ to caricature yourself on a whim with a bunch of mates.

That’s where our new friends come in! They’re certainly not one of those “caricature yourself” programmes that automatically convert photos into cartoon medium, but they’re almost that efficient. These are highly trained artisits who are used to producing several leaving gifts a day, using Photoshop and Illustrator to do the boring stuff, and just coming up with the creative elements themselves.

So now you’ll be able to caricature yourself on our site from as little as £35, which means cheaper leaving gifts when you don’t want to push the boat out!

But the main reason this bothers me as a question is that it’s incredibly difficult to caricature yourself. I’ve done so a couple of times, and every time I’ve thrown away drafts by the bucketful just to get to a draft I liked… and even then there was no way I could really be sure the caricatures actually looked like me! I’d have to ask some friends, say “honestly, is this me?”… and well, they said yes to this one. When my hair’s doing that thing. Sometimes…

Oh well, better stick to just doing other peoples’ leaving gifts and get someone else to do mine next time I have to do an update. After all, you have to caricature yourself every few years as you get older, if you want to caricature depiction to remain accurate!

But yeah, just doing leaving gifts for customers I don’t know is quite a lot easier. You look at them objectively, you tell their story from the outsider’s perspective… I’d love someone to do a caricature cartoon of me one day to see what if felt like!

All I know is that caricatures that really show a story make people truly happy when they see them. People have been reduced to tears on seeing one of our leaving gifts. So these caricatures are a great thing to do. But to caricature yourself is to step outside yourself and look at yourself like an object. Very tough to do!

Old-Caricatures-Website

So how did this whole caricature from photo business start? Well, I set up the basic website, advertising at photo to caricatures service, over five years ago. I remember: I was parking my bike at the gym, and had a eureka moment: I could do something I love and provide a unique service, nailing a specific market niche. These could be gifts for dads, for mums, for siblings, lovers… anyone! The customer comes up with facts, and the artist creates the caricature from photo material provided by the customer. Dead easy.

Current Charlies Cartoons Website

The problem then was twofold: First, how do I get my caricature from photo business out there? And second, if it does do well, how will I manage all the work on my own? Well the second question wasn’t relevant for a while. I worked with a minor, trickle-along google ad for a couple of years, from which I got to do a couple of gifts for dads here, leaving gifts there…

Then, just over two years ago, I decided it was time to take the plunge. My then girlfriend, who worked in advertising, said she’s take care of the marketing side if I put together the creative team, and got a few cartoonists to learn the house caricature from photo style. Good idea in principle, but then we broke up a couple of months later and I was on my own. I tried this and that to show that photo to caricatures was the best gift ever… Mailed out to friends and contacts, run a higher budget on adwords… I even pushed to get my cartoons in City AM and wound up being their in-house cartoonists. But the big moment for my photo to caricatures business was when I met my investor, Tony Briggs. He was amused by the whole caricature from photo idea, and believed that if we pitched the model to the right retailers, caricature from photo gifts could be the next big thing.

Two years and about 1000 gifts for dads later, we’re still growing and counting!

The Big Hunt

Wow. The Big egg hunt is finally over. Three months of effort, starting with the creation of caricatures from photos of our top British Olympic athletes, moving on to caricatures of celebs such as Maggie smith, and ending with the big exhibition in Covent Garden that attracted attention not only from locals but from thousands of tourists too…

And now it’s back to the regular day job of producing leaving gifts for our regular clientele… Caricatures from photos sent from all over the UK, to our little hub in London, where we sit down, pick apart and bring together the most recognisable features of a person’s life, and create, I think, the best caricatures you can find.

In fact, we’ve had a surge of leaving gifts requests recently. I wonder why? Birthday and anniversaries have historically been our most popular categories. But there’s something about leaving an office after years of work, years of history, that makes leaving gifts the most important gifts of all. These caricatures from photos have to say it all, from gentle mockery of funny incidents past to celebratory recognition of great achievements.

But I don’t want to get too worthy… these are only caricatures after all! It’s not fine art, but it is a fine kind of art, if you know what I mean… It’s never going to attract the trendy literati, but caricatures from photos nevertheless mobilise the artist’s most sensitive and acute faculties. And, unlike some “fine art” out these, caricatures from photos actually require a level of technical proficiency which the artist can use to serve his or her vision. You wonder sometimes with some modern art: which parts are truly intentional expression, and which are the fruit of technical limitations? At least our caricatures from photos artists can draw… and the do so extremely well!

“Our Team”, a cartoon egg I’d spent two and a half weeks making in January, got stolen in March when I was off on holiday. The organisers told me that they hoped it would return, just as the previous two stolen ones were returned after a thorough police investigation. But after a week or so of waiting, no such luck for us. Oh well I though, the insurance is covering it, so I guess we’re covered financially… but this is not the way I thought it would end!

Then, almost two weeks after the theft and four days before the end of the Big Egg Hunt event, just as all the London eggs were being taken off the street and gathered in Covent Garden for a final show, it turned up! I was hoping to hear about how it turned up, but Westminster Council gave nothing away. It was just there. Returned to us in Covent Garden. With huge black marks all over it, and a crack running all the way along one side, as it turned out.

So when I turned up to check it out at the “Egg Hospital”, my first reaction was to call the organiser Ruth and say No Way – I’m afraid it’s irretrievable. But then I looked at it again with my Mum who’s a specialist in trompe-l’oeil painting, and she said we could do it. And we did! Five hours of work later, it was sanded, the crack was filled, and we painted over it… and it went back up for auction… Securing £3,400 at the auction for the Action for Children and Elephant Family charities!

Charlies Cartoons:
Our caricatures from photos are the answer for everything from weddings and anniversaries to birthdays and leaving dos.

Then she and my dad went to see the other egg in Fortnum and Masons, and couldn’t find that either. Bu the time they got home, they had concocted a bunch of conspiracy theories… however it turns out that the F&M one is a “wandering egg”, ie it changes places every few days… so that one was safe – they’d just missed it.

However, the Olympic egg had actually been nicked.

Then I got the email through from the egg hunt organisers, with the bad news. Police investigating, and media campaign going! By the end of that day we has articles in the Standard, the Independent and ITV news… the hope was that, like for the first couple of eggs, the thieves may get exposed by the intense media coverage and hand the eggs back.

But no such luck so far…

It really makes you wonder. Why would someone do this? I honestly don’t know why anyone would bother stealing this egg. It only has value as part of this charity auction – people pay good money for these eggs because of the prestige associated with the cause. If I was a big name, then it might make sense. But this egg has no “black market” value. And I can’t imagine that anyone would commit such a crude act because the loved the art and wanted it for themselves. So the only motives I can think of are sheer anarchic stupidity and/or attention seeking.

Charlies Cartoons:
Our caricatures from photos are the answer for everything from weddings and anniversaries to birthdays and leaving dos.