Group caricatures for Morgan Stanley, APB, F&N and Heineken

Big job usually comes with long brief:-
"Hi Jit,

We would like to prepare a caricature picture with a theme something like the one you prepared for Lenka on Temasek.......

In terms of timing, looking for the final product by 10-11 April. Would like to see some rough sketches in the next 2-3 days.

If you can let me know the charges and who to address the cheque, I can deposit the advance amount today.

For the theme, we had the following in mind: 2 parties sitting across a table, there is a map of Asia Pacific laid on the table. The parties are negotiating on which territory belongs to whom. Place a flag for party 1 (Heineken) on India and party 2 (APB) on Indonesia and New Caledonia (an island in Pacific). Then there are other parties watching on the sideline. Have put together a rough sketch of the theme I have in mind

we have around 29 faces to incorporate as follow:

APB
Roland Pirmez (Key)
Vivek Chhabra (Key)
Philip Lam
Sze Khim
Geraldine (Key)
Karen
Adrian
Boey (Key)
Weng Hong

(Geraldine, karen and Adrian with lots of papers and files; Boey with a calculator)

Heineken
- Marc koster
- Siep
- Kenneth
- Steve (Can we show him doing some sort of theatrics - banging the table etc)
- Ernst

F&N
Koh Poh Tiong
Simon Israel
Anthony Cheung
Peng Seng

APB's Advisors
David (Key)
Peter (Key)
Johan (Key)
Gaurav
Eric
Sonali
Ibu tuti
Steven Lo

(Can we show Eric working on a computer and Gaurav and Sonali looking over his shoulders kind of supervising him; Ibu Tuti on a Phone; Steven Lo with files and papers)

Heineken's Advisors
David
Arfat
Ramiro

Let me know if 29 face are a bit too much and we can discuss....

These are the best pictures I could get, so please do the best you can with these. Understand for some faces this may not give best results but this is all I could get......"



This could be my toughest job, till date.
Not the biggest group. (I have done 87 pax for Coca Cola, 52 pax for Philip Morris), but I was provided many low resolution photos. That was bad enough. To make it worse, many of the photos are either looking down, hand covering mouth, three quarter back (not front) view etc. This is not the client's fault, as he also requested and waited for weeks for better photos, but we don't have much luck.

I told the client that we may lose the resemblance on some of them, given such photos. He understood. I came up with the above draft, based on his brief.

Feedback from the client:-
"Some minor comments on the caricature:

1. Can you make the people sitting on the table relatively bigger and the people in background a bit smaller to emphasize on people sitting on the table
2. Among APB advisor - David Aronovitch, Johan Dulat and Peter Chang should be more prominent than Gaurav jain, Sonali Johari and Eric Gnock Fah
3. Will send you photograph of David Serre later this afternoon
4. Move Sonali Johari from the left side to the APB advisor group side. You can have either David Aronovitch or Peter Chang shaking hands with David Serre
5. Please also show one APB flag on Indonesia and another APB flag on New Caledonia. New Caledonia is a small island on the right side of Australia (see attached picture)

Rest is good, thanks"


After relocation of these people, I started with this detail pencil sketch.


The inking.


And the colouring. Looks easy? No no. See the pain I went through on my Facebook.


(This is the high resolution scan-in of the original artwork vs those camera taken snapshots on top. See the difference in sharpness and colour.)
The background was added in the balance the whole drawing. The APB has more people on the right. F&N people needed to be in the centre, according to the brief. The Heineken people has lesser people, even with 1 APB guy shaking hand with them. I can't shift the APB guys over. While colouring them, I thought of having buildings in the background to balance them. So I drew in a window with Singapore skyline including landmarks like Merlion, Singapore Flyer, Suntec City, OCBC building etc. The curtain and carpet were added in to fill up the white space.
Looked pretty balance now. Do you think so?