The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Caricature Portrait Artist

Oh hi--I should've expected this; you're the kid who got suspended for doing that picture of the principal on the tennis backboard, aren't you? If you ask me, he should've been flattered.

S0--portraits? You mean those funny cartoon ones, right? Yeah, that should be worth tuition at art school... I mean, uhm, you probably don't have to go straight to art school; it might go something like this, instead:

You'll have to find some sort of town where tacky tourists go--make sure it has places where you'll see Texans in flowered shirts and such. Avoid Mexican and most Carribean resorts where the local kids will be pestering you all the time, plus it's too hot for the tourists to sit still for the entire 90 seconds it takes you to draw them. You might think somewhere like Paris is too upscale for this kind of work, but you're not trying to appeal to the locals; your clientele are the same people who think by yelling at foreigners or speaking in a fake accent that they'll somehow be more easily understood.

Plus, you can avoid the 8 seconds it takes to draw their hairstyle and just put berets on everyone. And how tough is it to throw the Eiffel tower in behind them?

The trick will be to find somewhere you don't have to pay outlandish busker/artist fees just for the privilege of working. That's why I suspect most regular tourist traps like the Santa Monica Pier won't work--but if you hang around near the sketchy sellers of fake rolexs in places like Battery Park in Manhattan, you're probably safe from too much harassment.

It won't be too challenging to learn the craft--first of all, almost every annoying tourist type who's paid for one of these sketches then comes home and uploads it to their internet holiday albums, so you can see plenty of samples to get the basic idea. If you need to, wander down to where any local caricature artist is working; treat them like they actually have some talent and they'll be glad to show you what they do--it's not like it ever happens to them.

The basic principle is simple--two-thirds head, one-third body.

You'll set up shop in some tourist town, and it won't take long until you learn the fundamental problem with your career--it's seasonal. In most places, you've got maybe a four-month window to ply your trade. You could try to move to other places to catch their tourist seasons, but you don't make enough to pay high-season rent in any of these locales.

Fortunately, after about four or five years of struggling through off-seasons doing horrible menial jobs you'll pray to forget, you'll sketch another typical rich tourist kid holidaying with her friends on daddy's credit card, but this one will be different. She's almost the same age as you, and while not exactly a looker, there's some little bit of chemistry there--though maybe it's just when she offers to buy you lunch you realize you won't have to make the difficult choice between sustenance and the two packs a day you smoke to get you through the boredom of the down time between customers.

You have a whirlwind romance, and soon you're engaged. Her parents fly you up to their estate to check you out, and it's clear they don't approve--but the suitors have been rare up to this point, so they feign a shallow cordiality that does little to mask their true hostility.

Her father is that type of eccentric that would be labelled crazy if he didn't have money, and your hope of wedded bliss comes crashing down when you sketch him one day. Seems he had a hydrocephalic twin who died shortly after birth and the gigantic head on your caricature convinces him you knew of the family's tragic secret and this is your way of mocking him and his pain. He orders you out of the house and forbids his daughter to see you again.

You exchange emails with her for a few weeks, but it's clear she's not willing to sacrifice her lifestyle to be with you. You go back to your spot on the tourist stroll, but in your absence, a new couple has shown up--she does sketches wearing little more than a bikini at one end of the boardwalk, while her good looking tattoed boyfriend does his at the other. They charge twice what you did and still have lineups of eager customers. You simply cannot compete.

You move back here, to your hometown, where you first try your hand at editorial cartooning. Unfortunately, while other kids were learning about politics and current events, you were skipping class, creating your graffiti masterpieces, and you simply are too ill-informed for your art work to grace the third page of the local newspaper.

Then you go to the local "party time entertainers" office. You think you're offering them something novel, but the owner's eyes just glaze over when you show him your samples of girls riding unicorns and boys in superhero capes. Still, he adds you to his stable of employees, and you go out to various birthday parties, as well as the occasional bat or bar mitzvah.

Your self-esteem is dashed when you realize most kids are disappointed when you arrive--you're a couple rungs of the entertainment ladder below both the clown and the birthday magician. Even the annoying "craft lady" who forces kids to glue stars to clay plant pots is better received than you are.

Desperate, you finally escape the humiliation of your home town--most of your classmates have been getting degrees and building successful careers while you've wasted the post-high school years trying to find some way to live off your modicum of drawing skill. You're lucky enough to score a job doing caricatures on a cruise ship.

You're so happy to get the gig you find out too late it's a non-smoking ship, so you spend half your earnings bribing the crew to let you sneak cigaretttes in the boiler room. You're making next to nothing, and your accomodations are terrible--you share a small stateroom with three dishwashers who speak little English and who spend all their free time playing some card game you don't fully comprehend, although they teach you enough one night to take most of your small stash of cash you've managed to squirrel away during the voyage.

Just before the trip ends, a rather mysterious asian man approaches you and hands you his business card, with a Hong Kong number and address. He tells you he has work for someone with your talents. You are desperate for any thread of hope so you don't check it out; you just dump your remaing cash on the counter of a discount travel agent and get a one-way ticket to chase yet another dream.

He explains that there is a market that his company meets that isn't entirely legal. He explains that in Asia there simply isn't enough of certain kinds of merchandise to meet demands, so that's where creative entrepeneurs step in.

Next thing you know, you're in a tiny, humid room in some southeast asian country with a government corrupt enough to look the other way while you and your other underpaid colleagues churn out the art work that is printed on all manner of counterfeit Disney merchandise--from t-shirts to training potties.

While your new country might be willing to accept bribe money from your employer to ignore the copyright treaties they've signed, they're also willing to take cash to look the other way when Disney's secret mercenary death squad shows up to wipe your little operation out. You and your colleagues are buried in a mass, unmarked grave, but somehow your passport surfaces a few months later, along with a story that you were killed in a drug deal gone wrong.

The dark circumstances of your demise make your easily recognizable signature on your old caricatures a hot commodity, and savvy collectors are soon scouring garage sales for your work--your posthumous fame may last months.