Artist’s Cartoon Drawings of Mom’s 1968 Yearbook

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John Martz (aka Robot Johnny) drew cartoon illustrations of every single person in his Mom’s 1968 Toronto High School yearbook (over 1,000 in all), for his project “Excelsior 1968”.

Here are all of John’s yearbook illustrations on Flickr.

Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968 over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible.

Scott Beale
Scott Beale

Scott Beale founded Laughing Squid in 1995 in San Francisco and is currently based in New York City. When not running the blog, Scott can be found posting on Bluesky and sharing photos on Instagram.