Sunday Mailbag: Caricature Block?

Q: Some faces are a challenge to exaggerate and get the needed likeness despite changing many elements or shapes of the face’s features. More often, I had to use another photo to get the likeness or stop drawing for a few days before starting again. How do you overcome such challenges and what techniques do you find useful in your kind of work?

A: Some faces can be elusive for various reasons, but most of them boil down to your just not being able to physically capture the image you have in your head. Sometimes you approach a caricature with a preconceived idea of what you want to do with the face, but your idea is not “right”. What I mean is that  whatever exaggeration you are trying to impose on your subject is not appropriate for them. While there are many different ways you can exaggerate a given subject, each different way still needs to be “right” for the subject. Their face tells you what is appropriate and what is not. You cannot impose a huge potato nose on a subject that has a tiny little button nose. That is not exaggeration, that is distortion. Approaching a face already having decided what you intend to do can result in your trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You have to be objective and exaggerate what the face tell you to exaggerate, not the other way around.

When I run into a face that is eluding me, I will do basically exactly what you say above. The first thing I do is seek better reference pictures, or at least ones from different angles. It might be the picture you are using is fooling you with the lighting, perspective, lens distortion or something like that. Failing that, I step away from the caricature for a while and work on something else. Then I can come back with fresh eyes later and I often immediately see where I am off.

Thanks to LEE F.H. from Sinapore for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!