{ Look Whose Coming } ~ For Dinner

Entertaining can sometimes be a challenge.

An illustration I did that was more directly tied to political events here in Canada.  Each year, the Press Club held an annual Dinner where the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader were invited.  This event is usually quite informal and the speeches are expected to be funny.   The Gomery Report was investigating former Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his Liberal party for gross improprieties and then-Opposition-leader Stephen Harper was generally seen as humorless even by his own party and more partisan than many leaders past.

It promised to get ugly.  With these events in play, the Annual Press Club dinner for that year was a hotly-anticipated event which Ottawa Magazine dutifully covered.

I'm a huge fan of fin-de-siecle French poster art like Toulouse Lautrec and the satirical artists that appeared in Simplicissimus which was a huge influence on the founders of the New Yorker.

{ top } the names are removed for a more generic illustration where 'fireworks' may be expected at the dinner table; { bottom } the illustration as it ran in Ottawa Magazine.

I was exploring mixed media at this point: employing rubber stamps which were inked; cut decorative papers; watercolor; brush, pen & colored inks.