Watch the movie MOV | FLASH Review-Journal reporter Corey Levitan mans the VegasCaricature.com booth at the Fremont Street Experience, offering black-and-white likenesses for $10. Good caricaturists can earn up to $400 a day. Photo by Craig L. Moran. Caricaturist Buddy Rose, right, attempts to teach Levitan that drawing like an artist is more important than looking like one. Photo by Craig L. Moran. Las Vegas resident Andrew Williams poses with the caricature Levitan rendered of him (below). Photo by Craig L. Moran. Click image for enlargement.

Everyone is an artist, according to the late German postmodernist Joseph Beuys.

I'm testing his theory at the Fremont Street Experience, by manning the caricature booth between the Four Queens and Fremont.

I've seen better ones," Andrew Williams said after I hand him my interpretation of his likeness.

The 27-year-old Las Vegan is being polite. I can draw exactly one face -- no matter what my subject looks like. The head is always flat, the nose broad and the eyelids missing.

Until Chaka, the humanoid ape from "Land of the Lost," shows up, I'm going to be off the mark.

Williams is my third customer in three hours, by the way.

"I think you're scaring people," said Buddy Rose, my art coach and owner of VegasCaricature.com.

That could be because I'm dressed like Salvadore Dali's unwanted love child and speaking in what I intend to be a French accent that sounds more like Borat's.

"Hey, Frenchy!" shouted the manager of the pose-with-a-Chippendales-dancer booth next to us, "how desperate do you have to be to attract customers?"

Williams isn't exactly a customer, either. At the end of my second hour, I began advertising my services for free.

"Free is too much," one woman actually said, refusing to slow her gait.

I hand Williams my disaster-piece and receive my first art critique -- his extended tongue. I inform the Army logistics assistant that Rose will redo the sketch, no problem. This raises a red flag with Williams' aunt.

"Is it free when the other guy does it?" she asked, suspecting a scam.

"I live here! I know what goes on!"

Caricatures were invented in Italy nearly 500 years ago by Annibale Carracci, the first painter to inform his portraiture with distortion. His idea was to exaggerate details that were unique to each subject's face.

So began a proud tradition continued by today's political cartoonists, comic-book illustrators and the guy who drew me at my friend Roy Silverberg's bar mitzvah as a giant nose riding a surfboard.

"The face is not difficult," Rose said as he tries teaching me. "You're looking at the generalizations of shape and line."

Rose always starts with the eyes.

"They're the foundation," he said.

Rose, 55, began drawing when he was a kid in Dallas.

"My father was an amateur caricaturist," he said. "He worked for the post office, but he would see a face he liked at the family reunions, and would whip it out. Of course, every kid wants to be like his father."

Rose has been working this booth for five of the nine years he has lived in Las Vegas.

"For the first two years, I sat here every day by myself," he said.

Success has allowed him to hire 28 other artists -- 20 to work private events and eight for Fremont. They're now the ones who work all holidays -- other than New Year's Day -- and summer afternoons without air-conditioning. Rose fills in when someone can't make it (or when wacky reporters need coaching).

"It beats working for a living," he said.

Caricaturists who are much, much better than me can earn $100 to $400 per day at VegasCaricature.com. (They keep 50 percent of the total collected.)

"But you can't make that by giving drawings away for free," Rose said.

A camcorder projects Rose's drawing-in-progress to a monitor at the back of the booth.

"And when you draw a nose, it's more than just a triangle," he continued with his lesson, explaining that heavy pressing with his LePlume brush marker produces thicker lines.

Rose is sketching a stranger from memory, by the way. About a minute ago, the guy breezed past, his face visible for about seven seconds. Rose finishes in less than three minutes.

"That comes from drawing about 600,000 faces," he said. (Most of those faces probably weren't Chaka's, either.)

Drawing in hand, I chase the subject down and discover that Rose was spot on -- with the exception that Rose was less cruel to him than life has apparently been.

"Our goal in doing retail caricatures is to make people feel good about themselves," Rose said.

Unlike the liberties taken with reality by political cartoonists, the ones Rose takes always err on the side of flattery. Noses are shortened, hair regrown, lips plumped.

"If you're working a party with a bunch of drunks, you can have a little more fun with the face," Rose said, "because then, the goal is to entertain."

I'm failing on both entertainment and self-esteem-bolstering fronts, however.

"I can't see it," said Sandy Sullivan, 40, from West Monroe, La.

I explain that people don't always know how they appear to the outside world.

"He's messing with me," Sullivan said to her boyfriend, Kenneth.

"Now do it for real," she said.

No matter how many times Rose shows me what to do, however, the LePlume will not listen to me.

"What?" asked my girlfriend, Jo Ann.

In one of my long lulls between customers, my long-suffering partner asked me to draw her. Stupidly, I complied and sketched myself into a corner.

"So this is how you see me?" asked the subject of "Chaka with Long Hair."

Little did I know that, as a relationship threat, this job would rank right up there with strip-club DJ.

I ask Rose, once and for all, what I'm doing wrong.

"Everything," he replied, "starting with your moustache."

He does offer one compliment, however: "I like your signature."

Two hours into my shift, Rose explained that another artist, Veronica Barney, 25, is waiting patiently to take over.

"I don't want to hurt her shift anymore than we already have," he said.

Rose calls my attention to a caricature hanging at the back of his booth. It's Donald Trump, and he's pointing straight ahead.

"You see what he's saying?" Rose asked.

The speech balloon reads, "You're fired!"

See video of Levitan as an artist at www.reviewjournal.com/video/fearandloafing.html.. Fear and Loafing runs Mondays in the Living section. Levitan's previous adventures are posted at www.fearandloafing.com.