Lesson One: Shapes... or "The Eyes Have It"

The first thing I am learning about drawing caricatures is that this is a serious art form that uses traditional drawing and painting techniques. You first have to know the normal and then see how your subject differs from that normal. I had never learned any of this stuff doodling in the margins of my high school notebooks. It probably would have helped!

Stuff like... the normal head is 5 eyes wide, there is one eye width between the eyes, the pupils of the eyes should line up vertically with the corners of the mouth, the nose is one eye wide and the distance from the mouth to the chin is one eye turned vertical. The eyes and eyebrows fit into the space of one eye turned vertical and so does the space from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the mouth. A perfect triangle can be drawn on a normal face using the outside corners of the eyes and the bottom of the mouth. 

Clearly, the eyes are the yardstick to which all body parts are measured.

The next lesson I learned was to break everything down into basic shapes. Blocking out all of the details will help to "see" the basic shapes of all of the features and allow you to start a framework for your caricature. Head shape is one of the most important features to "get right" when drawing a caricature. Seeing where the victim's, er... subject's head shape differs from the norm is KEY to capturing their uniqueness.

Inside the head shape is another important shape, the “T” shape made by the eyes and nose. T shapes come in many sizes but unless your subject is a Cyclops or an earthworm they all exist in some kind of T. Seeing that T shape and how and where is resides inside the head shape will go far in staking out the parameters of the caricature.

Finally it was time to wield my pencil, freshly imbued with newfound knowledge, and scratch out some shapes… I pointed my browser to TMZ.com and started doing caricatures of celebrities in the news! Well, caricature shapes anyway.

Perhaps you enjoy my humorous renderings of Charlie Sheen, Alec Baldwin and Dr. Conrad Murray?