Lesson 8: "Putty in My Hand"... or "Never Give A Caricaturist An Even Break"

Week 3 Reflections: The Final Chapter

Ugh... here is one i gave up on.
W.C. Fields would  be even less
recognizable with a small nose.

I'll close this series with a couple short diagnoses of my roadblocks. I think the two main hurdles in drawing for me so far are making confident strokes and getting proportion/symmetry right. First I have trouble drawing a line where I want it and then when I get a bunch of them on the paper the final sketch looks like a funhouse mirror. I know what you're thinking... Isn't that the whole idea of caricature? Not really, as it turns out there is a big difference between exaggeration and distortion. 


Exaggeration is picking a feature that already stands out and pushing it to a further extreme. Distortion is exaggerating features that don't necessarily lend themselves to exaggeration for that given subject. Giving Marty Feldman small squinty eyes or W.C. Fields a button nose are distortions. They don't fit on those faces and don't lend themselves to recognition, which is Rule #1 of caricature.

Distortions are like randomly
stretching a silly putty transfer.

So, in essence, my first caricatures are really portraitures of other people's caricatures. Unfortunately, I'm not putting the features in the right places and/or those features aren't the right size or shape so they look like unintentional distortions. I am making my faces too long, my eyes too close together and my ears too low. Sometimes I  can see what's wrong and don't know how to fix it and sometimes it's just a mess that can only be helped with a lighted match. 

Here is one I copied out of Tom Richmond's book.
It's Earl from the TV show My Name is Earl.

It's even more noticeable when I try to do a serious sketch of someone. In fact, you might even say that there is a thin line between my portraitures and bad caricatures. Maybe that's my fast track. "I thought I was a portrait artist until they told me I was doing caricatures."


It's not all bad though, I have done a couple that have been somewhat recognizable and will start showcasing them soon. While there is still a flash of panic in my wife's eyes every time I turn my sketchpad to her and ask "Do you know who this is?", she sometimes gets it right on the second try. I'm not sure why her first guess is always William H. Macy.