Big ears, small nose, cleft chin, wide eyes and dimples? Only a face a mother could love? Wrong.

“Nobody appreciates a face like a caricature artist does,” 24-year-old caricature artist Kira Layli said Wednesday afternoon at the Southern Iowa Fairgrounds. “Because we love it when there’s interesting faces, those unique faces, those are the most fun.”

Layli, who lives in Ames, was at the Southern Iowa Fair drawing caricatures and will be through Saturday. She is a May graduate from Iowa State University with a degree in art. She said her first professional taste of caricature drawing came as a volunteer during Veshia in 2007.

“And it went really well,” Layli said Wednesday afternoon while sitting in the breezy cool shade of the Kiddie Barnyard. “So then I liked it so much and it went so well, that I started building some business and looking for more opportunities and going to fairs.”

Besides her plan to work the Iowa fair circuit this summer, Layli also draws caricatures at Adventureland in Altoona. In her spare time, she manages an apartment in Ames for her parents.

Layli, whose real last name is Scott, said she has always enjoyed watching caricatures being drawn.

“And I always thought that it was really cool,” she said. “And I thought it would be kind of fun. But I never actually thought that I would end up doing it. So, it was kind of a surprise. Like I never really aimed for it, I just sort of ended up in it.”

The finished product is supposed to make people laugh, she said.

“You try to capture a likeness and make it a little funny. You’re supposed to make it a humorous drawing that captures the likeness and personality of the person you’re drawing,” she said. “And sometimes people don’t always understand that about a caricature. They’re expecting a portrait. But it’s really not a portrait.”

When Scott first entered ISU, her interest was in computer animation. Her dream is to work on a full-length animated motion picture.

“But not necessarily on the animation part,” she said. “Now it’s more character design and development. Like in the pre-production stages, design the characters, story development and storyboarding. It’s kind of my dream.”

And if in the near future an animated movie called “Axel Grease” involving a rat named Axel, who has trouble with messy and annoying animal roommates, like Randy the hedgehog, comes to the big screen, look closely at the credits and remember the caricature artist at the 2008 Southern Iowa Fair.

Herald City Editor Michael Schaffer can be reached by email at mschaffer@oskyherald.com