Sketch o’the Week- Alison Pill!

I had so much fun drawing Jeff Daniels from “The Newsroom” a few weeks ago that I decided to take a shot at another cast member from that show, Alison Pill.

I wish I had seen Alison here a few years ago when I was writing my book, because she is a perfect example of my “lines of force” theory for caricature. A central theme with caricature is the fact that a face has a fixed amount of entropy between all its elements. When you exaggerate the relationship (distance, size, angle) between some features, whatever you did needs to be balanced in another area to re-establish equilibrium. That’s generally easy when you make a nose longer, as you logically make the head longer and narrower and move the eyes closer together as a result. If you move the nose closer to the eyes, they eyes become farther apart and the head widens. But what happens if you are forced to move all the features closer together like Alison’s face demands? Then the “energy” or “force” you are squashing in needs to go somewhere, and the face itself expands in all directions. Her face is a perfect example of this.