Larry Roibal is an illustrator known for his work in children’s books and romance novels. His portfolio has examples from those areas as well as landscapes and portraits.

Roibal’s blog is often devoted to portraits of another sort, chronicling his practice of sketching character studies of people currently in the news directly on newspaper articles about those people.

This is one of those cool ideas that obviously came about as the result of doodling and daydreaming (you know, the stuff you’re told not to do in school), and maintains some of that feeling of informal happenstance even though he’s been at it for a while.

If the article isn’t from a corner of the paper that happens to include the date, Roibal clips out a dateline and pastes it on the piece. (I’m surprised he resisted the temptation to call this “Faces in the News” or something similar.)

I picked a couple of significant events out of his recent crop, showing Obama drawn on an article about his victory in the presidential election, and ace Cole Hammels sketched over an article about the Phillies’ long-overdue clinching of the World Series (YAAAAAAAAAA!!!…er, sorry, where was I?…)

Both the ephemeral nature of newsprint and the informal character of ballpoint pen give the drawings a sense of immediacy and make them feel like a natural part of the daily newsflow.

This should be a syndicated feature.