From a BMC School in Chandivali to Live Caricature Stages: The Ritesh Gupta Story
The founder of Creative Caricature Club learned to draw in a municipal classroom in Chandivali, Mumbai. A decade later his artists work weddings, boardrooms and brand activations across India.
Ritesh Gupta did not go to art school. He went to a BMC municipal school in Chandivali, Mumbai, where drawing was a subject squeezed between arithmetic and lunch, and where a fresh sheet of paper was something you asked for rather than something you owned.
That constraint shaped the way he still works today. Live caricature is an art form with no undo button: one sheet, one subject, four to six minutes, and a guest standing right in front of you watching the face appear. Gupta says the discipline of making a single sheet count is the closest thing he had to formal training.
He began by sketching classmates and teachers in the margins of notebooks, then graduated to the pavement economics of Mumbai — small orders, hand-to-hand payments, and the immediate, unforgiving feedback of a customer who either smiles or does not. By his late teens he was taking paid bookings at birthday parties in the eastern suburbs, travelling by local train with a folder of paper and a box of markers.
Creative Caricature Club grew out of those bookings. What started as one artist saying yes to every event became a roster: a network of caricature artists who can be deployed to a sangeet in Andheri, a company offsite in Pune, a mall activation in Delhi or a destination wedding in Goa, all working to a shared style guide and a shared turnaround standard.
The founding idea was deliberately unglamorous — make live caricature a reliable service, not a novelty. That meant fixed drawing times so a queue never stalls, printed thank-you borders so every sheet leaves the venue looking finished, standardised paper stock, and a booking process a corporate procurement team can actually process.
Gupta is candid that the education gap cost him years of confidence rather than years of skill. Municipal schooling in Mumbai gives students the basics and very little exposure to art as a career. Nobody in that classroom, he says, described "caricature artist" as a job that could pay rent, let alone employ other people.
Today the studio's work sits in two very different worlds. On the wedding side, artists draw couples, parents and guests as keepsakes that leave the venue in the guest's hand rather than in a landfill. On the corporate side, the same skill is used for employee-appreciation days, festival celebrations, conference booths and customer-facing brand activations.
For a founder who started with borrowed paper, the metric that matters is throughput with dignity: a guest should never wait too long, and no sheet should leave the table half-finished because the queue got long. That is the operating principle the studio trains new artists against.
Anyone wanting to see the current portfolio can visit creativecaricatureclub.com, and event dates, pricing and enquiries are handled through the studio's booking portal at booking.creativecaricatureclub.com.
What happens next: the studio is expanding its artist roster beyond Mumbai, Pune and Delhi, with digital-tablet caricature — printed on the spot and delivered to guests over WhatsApp — being trialled for large corporate floors where paper handling slows the queue.
Reported by the Sunday Show news desk.