| Howdy everybody! Here's the latest caricature (see below). It's of Maria Shriver-Schwartzenegger. It turned out about 75-80% accurate in my opinion. I did this today in one shot. (I was under the gun so to speak). I blew up the one picture I had of her (1" tall) - scanned it into Photoshop, corrected the contrast settings like crazy, converted it to gray scale and printed it out about 6" tall. With a little more detail visible in the features and shadows I went to work doing a pencil rough in about 20 or 25 minutes. (I'm pretty slow these days since I'm only drawing one day a month). I took the penciled exaggeration, rescanned that into Photoshop, contrasted it, printed it out in black and white, went to the light box and traced the exaggerated pencil printout in very light pencil. Then I added the big hair. Last and most tedious step: cross-hatching. If you want to get some really great cross-hatch practice, draw a large likeness of someone with a big head of black hair! You'll go bonkers. (I did.) Somewhere in the inking process the picture lost a little of it's likeness. And that's ok. Nobody ever said it has to be perfect. (Of course, I want to be! - but there's only so much time in a day and I'm learning to let go of that perfectionist trap little by little. I think today's caricature would be a fun one to really hack at as a case study.) I did all the inking with a Micron 01 (brand: Pigma, made by Sakura Comp.) on Grumbacher Pentalic "Paper for Pens" 11" x 14" paper. (like a super thin bristol board - great for fine ink work.) Two other things: 1) If any of you are interested in the National Caricaturist Network Annual convention, it's March 6-9, 2000 in San Diego, CA. Caricature super star John Kascht will be the guest royalty this year. Click here for details: http://www.caricature.org/ 2) Member and friend Tad Barney from Ohio deciphered the big gob of code in the last email. It's: http://members.aol.com/bjrfamily/famous.html (Tad's info: Tad Barney The NOSE Online Caricature Company http://www.the-nose.com 513-831-1584 888-234-7158) Take care all, making steady progress on the light and shadow chapter. I'll keep you posted. Keep on drawing! Warmly, Jeff Maria Shriver - Schwartzenegger
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