On the evening of September 23rd, I was scheduled to help the Herman Cain campaign in a room in the Rosen Centre hotel by donating time and drawing caricatures at that evening’s meet and greet with Cain. As I approached the room there was already a long line of people waiting nearly an hour before the event started. As the time for the event approached there were 4 of us in the room: me, a fellow with NBC chronicling Cain’s campaign, the Florida ground coordinator and the state head of his campaign and the crowd outside the room got larger and larger. When I arrived there were about 75 waiting. Soon there were 150… 300…500.. The problem was the room was only to hold 125. Apparently Cain’s handling of the Republican debate the night before and a speech to the gathered delegates earlier in the day drew in an unexpected response.

Now the really big problem. The hotel was full of meet and greets. There were no new rooms available. Others were full of other meetings or meetings that were constructed for other events. It appeared there was no where to go. This was a problem for the hotel also. They couldn’t turn the crowd away and they couldn’t have, what was by this time for the scheduled start of the event, around 1000 people coming into a room for 125. They pulled epole from everywhere to clear an assembled room for a large gathering next morning.

The new location was just across the hall. The trouble was that there were around a thousand people in between outside. So we headed for the service corridor in the back of the room and started running the length of the service hallways to the new room. I was hauling my easel with lights attached and the NBC guy had his camera over his shoulder.  We got in the room as a fit team was hauling hundreds of chairs and tables and podiums out of the very large room as fast as they could.

Quickly the room was cleared and an area was set up for Cain with a podium and a roping to keep folks a distance away. The meet and greet concept had to be set aside. There was no way to meet and greet a thousand people during a two hour period. Above is a photo of the final room with the NBC guy, coordinators, Cain’s communications director and hotel staff – The calm before the storm.

Soon the doors opened and the crowd, who at different points had been collectively singing outside the doors, streamed in and filled the room. Being in a corner on the opposite side of where Cain spoke, I really had trouble hearing him through the thick crowd. I was also busy drawing as many people as I could during a short period of time. Below are photos of a few that I drew.

Did the caricature thing Saturday. Here are some photos from the fun event!

Was doing the live drawing again using Justin TV and in 3 hours got a ton done! below shows the lot drawn which includes Tuesday’s editorial cartoon, Tuesday’s Swampy’s Florida, a bunch of book illustrations for a client, a character sheet for another client, a drawing of Ronald Reagan for a Justin TV viewer, etc. The Sketch O’ Week is also in the mix and shown above. Contributing subjects were Joe Read, “Monkey” , and TDebondt, “Fire & Baseball”. That was a tough one, but I did draw it right on the spot after the subjects were provided.

Was doin’ the caricature thing tonight in Orlando at the Orange County Regional History Center.

While on UStream today had a number of visitors and we got talking about music. I made some mention of attendee Terisa Glover’s dog, Sparky, providing banjo music at her store and the sketch above came to mind.

This came to mind also after learning that Cedric Hohnstadt is showing various drawings from his ‘Dueling Pigs’ site. I contributed one back in October.

A few caricatures drawn Saturday night.

Here’s Marnie and Pedro! I usually draw folks while they’re talking and I miss a big smile like his shown above. But then I would’ve missed his love of superheroes (Especially Green Lantern and NOT Rob Liefeld!).

Here are caricatures of Joseph and Meghan from Sunday!

Here is the pencil drawing before I ink. You might notice I started to ink with the caption box and the eyes. It’s been a while since I posted art in the process and thought I’d do it with this gag cartoon I’m working on right now.

More caricatures drawn at an event today.

Later I met with Robert Baurle and Ken Culotta at a Denny’s to talk politics and write gags.