Sketching the Election

What up, playas! The road towards the UCLU and ULU elections is finally at an end, and the candidates have pretty much run out of time to convince you of their worth; the speeches are made, the posters vandalised, and the Facebook hate campaigns have spewed their last ounce of bile. If they haven’t yet wooed you, you’re unlikely to be wooed at all. Armed with only a sketch pad and a selection of marker pens, we went on the hunt for voters, asking them to draw from memory their impressions of the nominees thus far, just to see who had made that crucial good impression. Click on the pictures to make them big.

Here’s Kirk Sneade, a permanently flushed lady-baiter who seems to think that his ovaries are on the outside (dude, it ain’t a crusade for equality when the only thing repressed about you is your crushing loneliness). The Fine Art student who drew him for us wasn’t fooled by his claims of girldom though; notice that he’s turned Kirk’s ear into something distinctly penis-esque. You naughty artist!

We don’t know much about Hannah Webb, so odds are that she’s quite nice. From the drawing, she appears to be some nightmarish amalgam of Pete Burns and the cross woman who works in the fish and chip shop near my flat. She also seems to enjoy wearing a necklace with her own name on it, which would serve her well in her proposed roles as External Affairs & Campaigns Officer and Community & Housing Officer (providing she only has to liaise with rappers from the 1980s).

It would be a brave man/woman to dare repurpose the face of our great leader Michael Chessum, current ULU president. Luckily, our artist didn’t really know who he was, so wasn’t afraid to depict him with monocle, top hat, and the beard of an especially creepy uncle. Whether he really does believe that we should “rave or die” remains to be seen.

We decided to request two sketches of ‘Dumble’ Doris Chen, if only because the first seemed a little bit racist. I am assured that the pointed hat she appears to be wearing is due to her predilection for wandering around campus dressed like a wizard, and that the author of the drawing was Asian himself (it’s modelled here by one of your lovely correspondents), but you didn’t see the malevolent glint in his eye. The second take on her isn’t much better – she barely seems magical at all.

Our last hopeful took on the task of sketching Beth Sutton, the incumbent Women’s Officer angling for re-election. Her poster sees her playing the role of a patriarchy-bothering superhero (albeit an overly litigious one), swathed in black and giving lady problems a good walloping, but our subject preferred to portray her as a frazzle-haired burns victim. Whatever works, babycakes.