Five Doller Holler (My Search for the Perfect Caricature)

Have you ever used Fiverr.com? A coworker told me about it last month, & I'd almost forgotten about it until, during the course of some routine Facebook stalking, I saw that the subject of my surveillance had posted a caricature of her & her fiance. In the comments, someone asked where she'd had it done, & she directed him to Fiverr.

Basically, Fiverr is an easy way to make a quick buck - five of them, actually. You tell Fiverr what you'd do for $5 (keep it clean, kids!) & visitors to the site have the opportunity to purchase your service/product/whatever. You follow through, they pay you $5, everyone is happy.

In theory.

Since discovering Fiverr, I've become obsessed with the idea of having someone do a caricature of me - & maybe of Nathan, too. We had a real-life one done last summer at Cedar Point, & the teenage artist rendering our images portrayed Nathan with an uber-skeevy trash 'stache that he has never had. It's framed in our living room but that doesn't mean I like it:

Yeahhhh...

So I've been on the hunt for a caricature artist whose work will replace or at least rival that. I have since paid $20 in Fiverr gigs (that's what each $5 offer is called) to try to come up with a dazzling cartoon version of myself.

The first seller I chose sent me this:

Hey, you did that on the computer, & you didn't even do it well! I wasn't born yesterday, bucko. This is most definitely not what I was going for. I could've made this myself using Picnik. Needless to say, this one was a disappointment, especially based on the other pictures this artist displayed in his portfolio of work.

I chose the next artist, a college student, based on the wording she used in her gig: "I will manually draw you & turn you into a cartoon." Manually draw? OK! That's the element that was missing from the last cartoon version of me, so let's give it a go!

Er, now I have my very own Sim! Seriously. While this is better than the first one, I'm not convinced it was, in fact, manually drawn, & even if it is, I'm more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that some artist in the Internet abyss spent time hand-drawing & shading my cleavage. Furthermore, why is my hair maroon, & why are my eyes so Cullen?! At least she got the eyebrows right...

The third & final seller is a bonafide caricature artist who I was really excited to buy from. Because she charged $5 extra for every detail (color, body, colored body, etc.), I paid for two gigs & got a head with color. This one is fine, save for the fact that she gave me a skinny horseface, but given the bodies of work she showed as her examples, I feel like she really phoned it in for me. I also don't know that the extra $5 I paid for "color" (read: lots of browns!) was worth it, but I'll let you be the judge:

Blah, blah, blah. These are all just so blah. Does my face not possess that certain je ne sais quoi needed to produce an adorable cartoon?!

Or...

Perhaps you just get what you pay for & this is what I get from turning to the Dollar General of caricature artists.

(PS: I posted a gig of my own, if you're interested!)