Hi all!

Here's your every-other-week-caricature: starring the infamous Hugh Hefner.
Why'd I pick him? No special reason. Just saw a small 1" size photo and it
grabbed me. I blew it up and worked from that. (See lower left hand corner,
page 16 of People Magazine, May 22 2000, with Tom Cruise on the cover.)

Usually, if I have to work from pictures - which seems like all the time
these days - I have half a dozen or more good photos to work from. I
challenged myself to come up with a likeness from this one shot. (It was a
good picture that I thought really captured Mr. Hefner). Like him or not, Hugh
has a very interesting face.

Picture 1 (on top) is the realistic one. (Dah.) It's Mr. Hefner's eye's,
jawy jowls and the little shadowy "upturns" at the corners of his mouth that
seem to me as very unique to Hugh. So I played on those. Hugh also has
fairly involved cheek lines and dimples with prominent mouth muscles that
arch from the chin to near the corners of the mouth. Speaking of the mouth,
Hugh's slight under bite makes the upper lip appear REALLY thin. And did I
mention the nose? He's got a slightly bulbous nose that points down close to
the upper lip. So I stretched the bulbous part and closed the gap between the
bottom of the nose and the upper lip.

By the time I got to exaggeration 2 (the third picture), I was starting to
get a feel for what I wanted to exaggerate.

Quick assignment: close one eye and quickly sketch the main outline of the
head/face. If you came up with a pear-shaped outline, you saw what I saw.
Scanning a face visually for the overall shape of the head is a great place
to start - you don't even have to draw the shape until you're done with the
whole picture, just keep it in mind as you lay down the features. If you're
drawing live it's your imagined format.

I usually don't pencil in the head until almost last when I'm drawing live. Very
simplified, here's my drawing order: I usually start with the nose, then eyes, mouth,
lips and teeth, then head shape, hair, ears and some silly body last; then I go back
and shade, add detail. Voila: "cha-ching" :-)

Keep on drawing,

Jeff K.