about christine and the blue studios

I’m pretty sure I was born with a paintbrush in my fist. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing or painting, an inclination that was encouraged at my years at high school when I was presented with a wonderful choice of available art classes.

I studied Illustration, Life Drawing and Graphic Design at Montclair State University, choosing this college because I wanted to minor in Psychology for an eventual Master’s or PhD in art therapy. This ambition was abandoned when I realized that helping others to confront their problems through art would mean giving up my own irrepressible need to create. I quickly got through the remainder of my general and psych courses, meeting my future beloved husband, Frank, in one of them. This freed me to focus on my artwork, and I shot to the top of my art and design classes. I took an extra year to take every drawing, painting, life drawing, and design course my school offered (thanks, Mom and Dad!) and graduated magna cum laude in 2001.

After I completed my education, I got a job doing graphic design at a Kinko’s store, then moved on to a varied creative career with JR Cigar and Cigar Magazine. There, I learned all about studio photography, published a number of illustrations, and fully mastered graphic design and the applications used to create it: Adobe InDesign, Illustrator, and especially Photoshop and Corel Painter.

I took a summer job in 1999 caricaturing at Great Adventure in NJ, where I was taught the techniques of exaggeration and quick sketching. While working there, guests were constantly asking, “Do you do parties?” “Can I have your card?” So The Blue Studios Caricatures was born. I left GA after one summer and started a party caricature business of my own. Working full time during the week and then caricaturing on the weekends was tough, but art has never felt like work to me, which is my favorite thing about being a professional artist. I created TheBlueStudios.com website myself, designed all my own promotional materials and found myself with a growing stream of clients.

That was 12 years ago. Later, in 2009, I thanked JR for all they had taught me and focused my energy on furthering my business while raising my wonderful baby daughter, Jocelyn. I have expanded into studio caricature in addition to illustration and live party drawing. For the last few years, I have been working on a new, detailed way of capturing my subject’s unique features and personality. Rather than drawing outlines, like in my party sketches, I have been painting carefully distorted - yet perfectly believable - faces with accurate tones, light and shadow.

I am fascinated with artwork that depicts people. I love faces, personalities, and the beauty of the human body, in any style or medium. I crave and am inspired by any creation that offers a new way of documenting the human experience, or captures the beauty of the human spirit in all its many colors and variations. That is why I am drawn to caricature.

In June 2011, I won first place in Caricaturama Showdown 3000, a world-wide caricaturing contest with my digital painting of Tina Turner using my new distorted realism technique. I’m confident that this new technique will be a great asset to my business and a complement to my party work, and my name is getting out into the caricature and illustration world. I am tremendously excited to see where my art and business will go from here.

Christine Fusco