Do you do caricature? It was an unexpected question that took Cristina Douglas a few minutes to answer. She’d studied illustration at Rhode Island School of Design and could “sketch people pretty easily”, but had never considered applying her skills to the quick art she’d watched being made at pop-ups on city streets.

Ms Douglas decided to give it a try. Her work in the corporate tent at the Rugby Classic was a hit that year and in the years that followed.

Through word-of-mouth, people started asking if she’d create special pieces: for milestone birthdays, for anniversaries, as retirement gifts and every other celebration in between.

Before she realised it, she’d added “part-time entrepreneur” to her titles of full-time art teacher and occasional painter.

Where typical caricatures poke fun of a person by exaggerating their features, that’s not what Ms Douglas’s art is about.

“With mine, some of your features are more exaggerated ― your head is bigger than the rest of your body ― but I tend to get some realism in there so that you recognise the person. I don't tend to, with my caricatures, exaggerate to the point that I'm making fun of the person,” she said.

“Most of my caricatures have some information of the person in them. If you have a street one done, they don't really ask anything about you, they have a generic formula that they follow and sometimes it can look really like you, and sometimes it looks nothing like you at all.

“It depends on the artist you're getting and what they look for to put it in. What I like about [mine] is that they are something permanent that they can frame and put on a wall. It's more what you would call character art.”

Her caricatures can be in colour or in black and white. The drawings start at 5” by 7” and can run as large as 15” by 20”.

Past works include one of a husband and wife on their boat with all three of their dogs in the picture; also highlighted in the drawing was the husband’s love of lobster diving and that the couple were leaving the island to live in England.

In another she incorporated a man’s favourite red bike, the opposing sports teams he and his wife supported, their two children and their two businesses.

A third caricature commissioned in honour of an insurance executive’s retirement, pulled in the company and his love of golf.

“There was one girl, they asked me to do a happy birthday theme for her and she loved [the hit HBO series] Game of Thrones, so I had her as Queen of the Dragons,” she said.

For the 75th birthday of a man who loved James Bond she incorporated a bullseye similar to those seen in the popular spy films, the Bentley the man kept at his home in France, and a tuxedo.

“I also get a few corporate ones. I remember one of them had 13 people in it and they wanted to give every one of them an original. I had to draw it 13 times. So basically it was the same drawing, but done 13 times – not printed, not photocopied,” Ms Douglas said.

“What people do is they commission me to do a piece. That way I can spend more time on it and put more interesting elements in it about a particular person.

“If somebody tells me they got engaged on a boat, I'm going to look up engagement caricatures and boat caricatures. I get ideas ― I never copy ― but I get ideas from other ones. I research.”

Time allows her to create only a handful of caricatures each year. Recommendations sometimes come from the Facebook group Maj’s List; Lexy Correia, the former owner of the art supply store DNA Creative Shoppe, was a huge supporter.

“I average about five to eight a year, sometimes more. But they range in different sizes, and remember, I'm a full-time teacher, so it depends. Christmas time tends to be very busy,” Ms Douglas said.

“There’s a price range because it depends what you're asking for. If you want a lot of explanation in it, it’s going to take me longer, it’s going to need more research. But, if you just want a basic one, that’s not so detailed and is in black and white, it’s a little cheaper. It just depends.”

• Cristina Douglas’s caricatures range from $175 to $475. For more information follow @cristina_caricaturist on Instagram or e-mail xtinad66@gmail.com