This is the second to last of the sketches I did for the for the pharmacy kids club project. Then there’s only one more sketch left from this sketchbook and we’ll move on to something else.

It’s my brother Glenn‘s birthday today. I will spare you all the horror of me singing “Happy Birthday” to him.

Yes. It’s her.

I don’t know if the client’s kids club is still active. We never met with her after the big meeting in California. About five years later I did see a kids club publication in one of the supermarket’s pharmacies. I think I took a copy home with me but danged if I know where it is now.

As I remember it, the client had some sort of show down in Southern California. As part of the art she would play different characters besides the friendly pharmacist. I don’t remember if we were shown any photos from the actual show. I know that we definitely didn’t see any footage of her in action. If we had I would have had a better sense of how to portray her. In person she was very buttoned down. She didn’t come across as someone who enjoyed performing or being creative or spending time with kids. Not that she disliked any of that, necessarily, it just took some imagination to see her being imaginative.

Did I mention that I did a lot of sketches of this woman?

At some point we asked the client what she thought of the caricaturing I was doing of her. She was mostly noncommital. Except. She thought her cartoon self wasn’t smiling enough. Didn’t look friendly enough.

Hmmm.

I wanted to point out that if she wanted her cartoon to smile it would help if she gave me a real life example to follow. Oh well.

Barely awake at the moment. Is this the client? Yup. It’s the client.

There’s quite a few more sketches of this woman to come. More than I usually do of a subject at one time. Nizzibet, the client and the client’s package developer were doing most of the talking. So I just sketched.

Is a kids club sponsored by the pharmacy department of a major supermarket chain a bad idea? Probably. Lord knows I think that even bad ideas have a place. This idea just seems like a joke. There’s just too much opportunity for corruption and marketing. Should we have taken the job? Maybe if we’d been willing to do the work, take a check and get out. The client had her own ideas and really only wanted someone to execute them, maybe providing a glamor to what she was already planning. We did get paid for the work we did. It was one of our largest paychecks for, really, some of the least amount of work. I can’t complain about that.