WSJ Style Portraits of Presidents

all images, c. Kevin Sprouls So, it’s getting pretty heated out there politically. With the midterms having blessedly passed, I thought it might be fun to present some of my WSJ style portraits of presidents. I’ve created many of these, as you’ll see. When I was at The Wall Street Journal, I produced portraits of many world leaders and politicians. But, for this post, I’ll stick to U.S. Presidents.Remember this guy? I made this portrait of Barack Obama for a client who had it printed on tee-shirts for his first Inauguration. I’ve illustrated Mr. Obama a few times. The Illustration below was used on a Harper’s magazine cover:Workman, a publishing house, https://www.workman.com published an parody Anthology of Poetry a few years ago. The “poems” were extracted from utterances of some culturally famous people. Here is Obama’s portrait from that book:Working backwards, Here’s a caricature of George “W” Bush I created, WSJ-style:Going further back, This is a hedcut I made of Franklin Delano Roosevelt for The Wall Street Journal when I held my day job there…You can spot my signature toward the base of the drawing if you look closely.I was commissioned to create a detail from the twenty dollar bill for a retailer advertising a sale. Andrew Jackson in his oval frame:Lastly, here is one with a twist: I took on a quite challenging assignment when I agreed to render the back of George Washington’s head. I wonder if you can imagine the difficulty of finding source materials for this angle! It was not really possible to unearth anything to go on, so I just made it up. I don’t recall the rhyme or reason for this image, something for a print ad I think, but it was an interesting challenge to take on……complete with backward running typography.That’s it for now, Thanks for visiting my blog!