March 4th, 2002 |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Your 4 March 2002 YouCanDraw.com every other week Caricature: more Larry King |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Howdy folks! In today’s Every Other Week Caricature you’ll see more of Larry King and the next stages of exaggeration. Did we finish a picture today? No, but I think you’ll see the picture shaping up some. Last issue you saw the first roughs of Mr. King (to be posted in the next couple weeks) and this week we’ve refined them even more. They're not pretty or artsy, but they're starting to work... Areas we focused on What seemed notable about Larry 2 weeks ago (which haven't changed), were the bulky tip of the nose, the asymmetric mouth, the general mass of the head and the relatively small chin. The hairline was also notable for both the bulk of hair - which you wouldn't expect - from someone with so much forehead. And those trademark glasses... I also decided to pursue the “three quarter view” rather than a straight on front view or a profile (heck, I don’t think I’ve done a profile in 20 years :-) Old training aids To get on with it, this week I had to revert to some old drawing aids that I pull out when I’m in a drawing slump, namely tracing paper and one of those fine point Paper Mate mechanical drawing pencils in place of the big fat 4-6 B drawing pencil. The method Here’s the usual course of things before I pull out the tracing paper. I find a handful of decent pictures of the subject (I could only find 3 or 4 ok pictures on the Internet - none of which were more than about an inch and a half tall. One great picture is all you really need to start with. And where do you find those? All over the place - but especially in magazines and on the web). Just draw Then the task is to start drawing. Yep, just dive in and start drawing. Sometimes drawing one feature at a time until I “get it” is the program; sometimes I start with the overall large shapes (like the head and main masses of the face). After drawing the individual features I might just do a realistic quick sketch. If a realistic sketch or a slightly exaggerated picture starts to work, well then why reinvent the wheel? That’s when I get out the tracing paper. I lay the tracing paper right over the “sort of working” previous drawing and exaggerate “on the spot” but using the underlying decent picture as a guide. This way I can trace what works and concentrate on what needs more embellishment,. And you can see the process at work in today’s picture. I didn't come up with a finished inked product that I was happy with - that I usually try to get finished within two weeks of starting. Oh well. Maybe it’ll be more useful to you to know everybody (me included) gets into slumps. (Not like I’m a world famous or world class artist yet either :-) But that’s not a whine. This is practical stuff. Any thing that gets you practicing and expanding your craft (as long as it’s legal, moral, and half responsible) is allowed. So... Looking at the pictures, here’s specifically what I did: the far left drawing was the picture I chose to run with. The middle picture is a trace of that - with a whole mouth study. It was the mouth that gave me the most trouble - and especially in a ¾ view. But note how much more satisfying a ¾ view is to look at: When it’s done right, and the proportion is correct and the foreshortening is correct perspective, it jumps off the page at you even if there’s smudging and erasing etc. The nitty gritty Compare the area of the mouth in all three pictures. Isolate the lines in each that make it work/not work: follow the blocks of the tip of the nose, follow them down to the upper lip, compare left to right between the three the shape of the teeth in the lower jaw and the shadow space just above them (actually the dark space of the mouth) Look how the eyes stay very similar in the left and middle drawings and how they evolve in the right picture. (You also have to ask if it isn’t starting to look like someone other than Larry King. Look at the glasses - how they change. What happens to the proportion of the different horizontal landmarks (the middle of the eye line, the bottom of the nose line and the and the middle of the mouth line) Can you isolate them even in a ¾ view? (Good work:-) Lastly, look at the overall masses of the head and face: the far right drawing the head is getting pretty inflated and the overall mass of the nose and mouth keeps shrinking. Note also the angle of the lines used to draw the forehead: do they suggest mass and a large underlying bony mass? Ask yourself how that was accomplished with just a few lines. Well that’s about it for today - I know how over long emails get tiring. I’ll try to have a finished drawing of Larry next time but if not, the process of getting there will be interesting. I hope. A question for you: (Give me your feedback: do you prefer a slam dunk likeness or is wrestling through the process more beneficial to you?) Take care, Spring is almost here! (Though I’m not really qualified to make that statement since I’ve only been back in Minneapolis four weeks after 10 years in Los Angeles :-) ...and keep on drawing. Warmly, Executive Director (952) 920-9827 6920 Southdale Road Minneapolis, MN 55435 http://www.YouCanDraw.com "Once and for all getting you drawing faces and caricatures" mailto:comments@youcandraw.com |