With lots of attention being paid to the inauguration of the new American President today, here’s a set of portrait drawings of the 43 former U.S. presidents by Rick Tuma, a staff artist for the Chicago Tribune. The series is posted as a special feature called Presidential Portraits on the Tribune’s web site.
Tuma painted his series of presidential portraits in ivory black watercolor on bristol board. If you go to his web site and choose “Other Things” at the bottom of the portfolio pages (easy to miss if you don’t know to look for it) you can flip through the thumbnails to the page about the series.
Tuma also does a variety of illustration for the Tribune, from info-graphics to cartooning, and also does freelance work in addition. His online portfolio is divided between watercolor, pencil and digital. (He also apparently collects toys, you can see a QTVR view of his toy-filled work station at the tribune here.)
It’s interesting to see the range of presidents’ faces as portrayed by a single artist. Some of them are of course more interesting as subjects for drawings than others. I’ve selected a couple of the images above for that reason and a couple for relevance to current events.
In perhaps a bit of cleverness by Tuma and Tribune on the presidents portraits: As of this morning, the site allows one to visit 44 of 45 frames in that slideshow. I’m guessing that after noon today we’ll be able to see his Obama portrait as well.