This commission has the best back story of anything I've ever drawn. From the client:
"Lola, Joyce and I started our company in 1985 when we were all laid off from another company. We were broke and unemployed and therefore had nothing to lose.
At the time, each of us owned an old, beaten-up vehicle with a lot of character. We always laughed about how we’d go to a meeting at some corporate headquarters, dressed in suits, and we’d park our old jalopies in a back corner of the lot and hope no one saw us near them.
Our business began to prosper, and we eventually replaced our vehicles. But in all the years since then, we’ve regretted that we never took a picture of us, wearing business clothes, standing in front of our jalopies--the original FredComm Fleet (the company’s name is Fredrickson Communications).
Not too long ago, Lola retired from our company. The anniversary of her retirement is coming up, and I was thinking about some kind of gift or tribute for her. I remembered about the FredComm Fleet concept, and then thought I might be able to find a caricature artist who could recreate the picture we always wished we had taken. Which led me to you!
Now, here are details about the vehicles, and I’m hoping you can create a reasonable representation of each:
Lola owned a purple Gremlin. Gremlins were one of most butt-ugly cars ever manufactured, and to make one in purple was almost a sin. But Lola loved it. And hers was special. She lived in a rough Minneapolis neighborhood, and at one point a delivery truck backed into the car and smooshed the front end a bit, which gave the hood a bit of an open-mouth snarl. This also meant that a person could reach through the gap in the hood and flip the latch to open the hood, and within a few weeks, local thieves figured this out and stole two car batteries from her. Lola’s dad used his creative ingenuity to fix the problem: He bought a large gold padlock and gold chain, drilled some holes in the front end, and attached the padlock and chain so you couldn’t open the hood without the padlock key. This solved the battery theft problem, and as an added bonus, gave the snarling purple Gremlin a punk-rocker appearance.
One final detail about the Gremlin: another result from the delivery truck collision was that one of the headlights was loose in its fixture, and when the car was bumped or jarred, the headlight would pop out and dangle by the wire, just like an eyeball popping out of your head and hanging by the optic nerve.
So on to my pickup truck. I had an old blue Ford F100, which I had an accident in sometime earlier, resulting in the front end being fairly crumpled. And since I was broke I didn’t bother trying to get it fixed. The trouble was, the hood latch was damaged, and to prevent the hood from flying open while driving, I tied it shut with a bunch of rope wrapped across the front grill. The truck kind of looked like those shrunken heads you see, where the lips have been tied shut.
Joyce’s car was the nicest of the bunch, which isn’t saying much. She had a white Monte Carlo with a maroon Landau roof. It would have been a sharp-looking vehicle in its youth. But this wasn’t its youth. The car had an extensive case of rust-cancer. Plus, the maroon fabric of the roof had weathered and was cracked and peeling all over, revealing a muddy gray underlayment.
And that’s the FredComm Fleet!"
