28 November 2000

Hi all, 

This week, as promised, I ran Mr. Spacey "through the mill" (it's a saying 
we have here in the states. It means "worked him over", lessee that doesn't 
help much, that's another saying. It means in this particular case I tried 
to draw him lot's of different ways.) 


Six different ways in fact. I've had a little more time lately to draw (at 
last! ) and so did a few extra drawings. I do have to say the longer you 
look at one picture when you're drawing somebody the more you catch yourself leaning to a side, trying to look around to see them at a different angle. This is kind of hard to do with a photograph :-). But I'm pretty stubborn 
and I said I was going to do this all from one photo (a little challenge). 

Today when I finished, I DID look at other photos of Mr. Spacey - and it was 
a strange sensation (I remember thinking "why didn't I do this earlier?").


What do you think?

To get down to it, I don't know if the caricatures are a "success" or not. 
There's some resemblance. What I want you to do though is look at all the 
different versions and pick out what's similar in all the pictures. Then go 
back and see if you can't identify what's different. THEN, (and this is the 
big step), try to QUANTIFY the differences. What the heck does "quantify" 
mean? 


Measure!

Simply this: get out a measuring stick, or a fine ruler or just use the side 
of your pencil and measure the distances between all the main features. If 
you can put those distances in terms of features (like "the nose at it's 
most bulbous is almost one eye width wide", or "the forehead in the picture 
with the fat head is 5 eye lengths wide"), if you can go that extra step all 
the better. Send me your measurement results if you like (your "sightings"), 
and let me know which one you think looks most like Spacey.


Subtle differences make all the difference

What I found most interesting while drawing these (in five 30 minute sittings 
with no warm up over 5 days), was how different the drawings started to look 
to me while drawing them. What do I mean by that? For instance, by changing 
the thickness of the upper lip in one picture, Mr. Spacey started looking 
more like Russell Crowe. In another more like former New York City Mayor Ed Koch (I didn't send that picture - he REALLY looked like Ed Koch and I'm going to send him one day...as Ed Koch :-0). In others I started seeing 
Harvey Keitel, Gene Hackman and even Alfie Newman (of Madd magazine fame).


Take home point

The point I'm trying to make here is this: as different as people look, 
differences might be very subtle - differences between the height or width of 
an eye or the size of the tip of the nose can be very subtle, but the sum of 
those small subtle differences adds up and we can recognize somebody as 
totally different, totally unique without any problem. 

Conversely when you really grasp someone's likeness in a drawing, (which to 
me means when you've really observed and discovered AND gotten specific 
about what makes them unique), you can distort the heck out of their picture 
and they're still recognizable - some times even more so than an undistorted 
picture. Strange how the mind works. 


So check out the picture below (it got pretty big but I think when I get 
around to uploading it, I'm going to upload it REALLY big so you can get a 
great look at the details.)

Keep on Drawing, 

Warmly, 


Jeff