A Small Breakthrough

 

12/19/22

Back during InkTober, I got the idea to try my hand at caricature with the portraits I was drawing. I was pleased by a Bassett hound I had drawn like a cartoon, but I wasn’t happy with the humans. I think my focus on resemblance had held me back. I drew interesting faces, but they bore no resemblance to the source material. I may as well have been drawing from my imagination (which isn’t a bad thing, but wasn’t my intention or goal). I gave that up, especially since it wasn’t as fun as I had expected it to be.

Earthsworld, the photographer whose portrait reference photos I have been using (all photos shown here), inspires many artists. Recently I was scrolling through his hashtag and in a Facebook group devoted to works inspired by his photos, and I was taken by all the cartoony images and caricatures. It was fascinating that even though features may have been wildly exaggerated, I could still recognize the reference photos (some of which I had drawn from myself). I became inspired to give it another shot.

The first portraits shown here of the young woman are the most interesting to me because I had tried drawing her realistically twice (below in purple ink) and really struggled. After that frustration, it was fun to draw her as a caricature (top of post). (I had stopped including reference photos in my posts, but I’ve put them in here because I thought it would be informative as well as fun to show what I was working with.)

12/14/22

12/15/22

For the next two, thinking that it might be easier to get past my need for realism, I again used photo references that I had drawn from previously. They don’t look wildly exaggerated, but they felt very different compared to my attempts in October. I didn’t hesitate the way I did then, and I wasn’t hampered by feelings of being disrespectful. (I’ve already abused so many people by drawing them that I guess I’m long past feeling disrespectful!)

12/19/22

12/19/22 I thought I was exaggerating his pout,
but his actual pout defies exaggeration!

The bald man below is the best example of achieving my intention: Although I exaggerated features and turned him into a caricature, I think I still retained the essence of his expression instead of just making distortions. I’m not saying all caricatures must retain expressions, but it feels like a transition I must make before leaping completely away from realism.

12/20/22

As I was making these, I started wondering about the processes of the artists whose caricature and cartoon works I have been admiring. It’s obvious that they have strong drawing skills. Did they start out drawing realistically and gradually transition to cartoony takeoffs? My guess is that they did, as I think it would be much more difficult to draw a caricature without a solid base of drawing faces realistically. Maybe in the Facebook group, I’ll have an opportunity to ask some of them or see their other works.

My thinking here is also related to the concept of “looseness.” Many (most?) artists who are known for their “loose” styles (Suhita Shirodkar and Melanie Reim come to mind) were classically trained in realism and drew much more “tightly” before they ever became the “loose” artists we now recognize. It took me a long time to understand this, but I have come to realize that you can’t just decide you’re going to “do loose”; looseness is something that you choose to grow into – and that takes a long time to develop.

I think one reason I struggle with caricature is that my training in realism is based on observing closely and drawing what I see – the opposite of being sloppy and careless, which often get confused with “looseness.” Sloppiness is not at all the same as what we call “looseness” (in the sense of Suhita’s and Melanie’s styles). If I draw a sloppy, careless face, I’m not observing at all – I might as well be drawing from imagination (though not easily – that’s a whole other challenge, as I learned earlier this year). So my struggle is at least partly because I’m still observing closely, but now I’m deliberately trying to draw what I don’t see.

I think it would be easy to simply make a bad drawing with inaccurate proportions and distorted features, then call it a caricature. My intention is to continue observing closely but to make conscious choices about how I want to exaggerate or distort what I see.

As a geek of the creative learning process, this is all super fascinating to me!