Lesson 2: Paging Dr. Lavoisier... or "A Human Head Weighs 8 Pounds, No Matter How You Stretch It"

Antoine Lavoisier is known as the
father of modern chemistry.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was a French scientist in the mid 1700s. He did a lot of cool stuff. He identified and came up with the names for a few things you may have heard of, like "Oxygen" and "Hydrogen." He helped to develop the metric system (apparently it's big in Europe). He also came up with the Law of Constant Mass or Law of Conservation of Mass. That's an important law for potion pushers, physics squints and the quantum theorists who, as you know, I am so jealous of. As it turns out, it's an important law for caricaturists too.

You may have heard of this law in other words like "Matter cannot be created nor destroyed" or something along those lines. To boil it down, it just means all of the parts and pieces in a closed system are there already.You can combine these parts to make new stuff, you can break down stuff to turn it back into parts but 'nothing comes from nothing" and "from dust to dust" and so forth. You can turn a porkbelly sandwich into a clogged artery but everything to make it was already in the universe and tomorrow the parts not clogging your arteries will be turned into something else. 

When you think Jay Leno,
you think chin.

What the heck does this have to do with caricature you ask? Same principle… When you do a caricature you start with the standard perfectly symmetrical portraiture head we talked about in Lesson 1. Then you look at your subject and see how your “target head” differs from standard. Maybe your subject has a Jay Leno chin or a Jimmy Durante nose. Those are things you would definitely want to exaggerate. The Law of Constant Mass says that if you add mass to make a big chin or nose you have to remove mass elsewhere.

Jimmy Durante had a nose
caricaturists would kill for.

If you make one part bigger, some other part (or combination of parts) has to become smaller.  Think of it like the subject’s head is made of clay and that is all the clay you have to work with. If you want a big chin you will likely have to take clay from the forehead to make it. If you want a big nose, the eyes may need to be reduced or if your subject has large eyes and a large nose, perhaps the whole head will have to be made smaller to accommodate.

You can also think of a head as painting a face on a water balloon. If you want to make someone with a big thick neck and heavy jowls, you squeeze the top half of the balloon and the bottom swells. If you push on the top and bottom the whole head becomes short and fat. If you squeeze the sides, it becomes tall and skinny. These are all very different head shapes but they all use the same amount of mass.

Who knew there would be so much studying... but this is very important groundwork we are laying. As you can guess, by now I am getting pretty antsy to start drawing something.  Time to set the bar! 

Ugh. I must have lost my head thinking reading a book would translate to paper so easily. I told you studying wasn't my thing. Could be worse,  poor Antoine Lavoisier ended up losing his 8lbs to the guillotine in the French Revolution.