Illustration

I have started work on a practice illustration. I am fairly confident in my ability to get a solid likeness and render it to my satisfaction, however, The piece of the illustration puzzle I need to work on is to place a caricature into context, to that end I am doing a depiction of Sarah Palin as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. I am also going to start taking news stories and thinking about how I would illustrated them.

I want to move into doing illustration work for publication and this seems like good practice. Any ideas you folks have would be greatly appreciated.