Q: I am planning my wedding reception for the summer and love the idea of adding Goofy Faces to the reception for our guests to enjoy! We expect 300 guests. How many hours and/or caricature artists should we book?

A: Many of our clients and customers ask this question. Here is what we do to figure that out; First of all, unless it is a very intimate party with 30 guests or less, it is unlikely that everyone will have enough time to be dawn. But that’s ok. Not everyone wants a caricature. But everyone gets to enjoy watching our artists draw all your guests. Therefore aim to provide caricatures to about 60% of your guests. So, for instance, if you have 300 guests, plan for 180 of them to be dawn.

Next, how many hours do you have to work with? Most receptions tend to have 3 to 4 hours available for the artists to entertain guests. Most caricature artists average around 10 to 15 faces in B&W per hour (or half of that in color). It doesn’t matter whether your guests are drawn individually or as couples. The artist draws faces, so a couple counts as 2. Therefore, each artist is worth about 45 faces in 3 hours or 60 faces in 4 hours.  To reach your goal of 180 caricatures for your guests, we suggest hiring 3 artists for 4 hours or 4 artists for 3 hours. The total price would be the same in either scenario since we book each artist by the hour. Rates vary per artist so make sure to research your choice of artists in our online directory. We also have an online artist calculator you can use to figure out how many artists you need as well.

# of artists X # of HRS = 60% of guest total