Sunday Mailbag: Fixing Mistakes Drawing Live?

Q: You’ve talked about drawing live and why you don’t start with face shape and instead begin with the details. You mentioned the thrill of working without a safety net by not sketching anything first and just diving in. With that in mind, if you find you’ve goofed up… then what? Just thinking about that situation gives me anxiety.  Have you ever scratched a live drawing and started over? I assume it’s a similar rush one gets doing stand up comedy, where it’s just you and your wits to see how you can get yourself out of a jam.

A: Live caricature is not for the faint of heart. You are drawing fast and spontaneously without a net, in front of a crowd of onlookers. It’s a very intense dynamic.

When you are drawing that quickly and spontaneously, it’s inevitable that some drawings will go “off the rails” on you. Maybe you made a bad decision, or you just got lazy, or you’re tired, or you just blew it with some bad lines.

Usually I can tell if a drawing is going too wrong to recover from within a few lines. That’s one of the benefits of starting with the interior features and working from the inside out. The relationship of the eyes and nose (the “T” shape) is one of the lynchpins of any caricature, so if I feel I’ve messed that up badly on those elements I will start over. I’m only a few seconds into the drawing at that point, so I have not wasted much time. If I am confident that I got that right, then other aspects of the drawing that might be off are more forgiving.

I have this trick to make an excuse for starting over. When I decide (again just a few seconds into the drawing) that is one needs a re-do, I press hard on the pencil while it’s at an angle and the end of the graphite shatters. This send the end piece flying and makes a big mark on the paper. Then I go “Oops! Your face broke my pencil!” and grab a fresh sheet. That gets a laugh and no one knows I messed up the drawing.

Beyond that, I am working in pencil. It’s a soft lead and I press pretty hard to get the kind of dark, bold lines I want so erasing is not easy to do, but some minor correction is possible if I am well into the drawing and I feel some other element I have drawn is too far off. I don’t like to waste time erasing and redrawing though. It can easily become a crutch that is relied on too often. 99% of the time I work around anything I feel is a “mistake”. 100% of the time no one but me notices anything is off.

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