Sunday Mailbag- Getting a Likeness?

Q: I’ve drawn and doodled for most of my life; 37 years. When it comes to caricatures, I struggle to draw features that have likeness to the reference feature. I understand your methods on how to exaggerate (T for eyes and nose, feature separation and proportions) but I guess I struggle to see a nose, for instance, and draw it with likeness. How do you reference a feature, and know exactly how to draw it with likeness and exaggeration? All of your caricatures have distinctive features that are used with that subject only. You don’t copy/paste and tweak a nose from your mental archive, its always distinctive and different.

A: There is no secret to drawing features so they capture the likeness of the subject in caricature or portraiture… it all starts with getting the SHAPES right.

Frankly that’s the key to all good drawing.  It’s not good rendering or linework or other techniques. It’s about the shapes. If you get the basic shapes right then everything falls into place. If you get them wrong, then it doesn’t matter how well you shade or crosshatch or paint. Your drawing will not capture the subject.

Take eyes for example. Capturing the likeness of someone’s eyes starts with the simple shape of the eyes:

If you don’t get those shapes right, it does not matter how well you use whatever technique you use to describe the shapes… they won’t look like that person’s eyes. It’s also not just the shapes of the eye, but the shapes of the upper eyelids, the shapes created by the negative space between the eye and the eyebrows, etc.

Everything is a shape. A portrait artist blocks in those shapes very accurately and then applies good drawing/rendering techniques to describe the features with those good shapes as the foundation. A caricaturist exaggerates those shapes like I did above, where I exaggerated the arch of the eyebrow on the left and the opposite arch on the right. It’s still the correct shapes, just with the “volume turned up”.

My pal Stephen Silver talks about how too many artists concentrate on the techniques of drawing or painting before they have the fundamentals of good drawing (that would be drawing good SHAPES) in place, especially in these days of digital art. It’s very easy for people to be able to do these digital paintings that emulate oils or whatever without the terrible inconvenience of actually learning to paint with the real media. The results are elaborate digital paintings of bad drawings, which are still bad drawings no matter how good the rendering happens to be. Steve calls this “polishing turds”.

Unfortunately drawing good shapes is as much about SEEING the shapes as it is about drawing them, and you can’t suddenly learn how to see. It takes thousands of hours of looking and drawing to develop your eye to see shapes and their relationships to one another. This is also where the “talent” part of the equation comes in. You can learn the mechanics of how to draw through practice and hard work… anyone can. It’s the ability to “see” that some people have more natural ability with than others. That’s not to say you can’t develop that sight, it’s just that is comes easier and more natural to some than others. No one likes to hear that, but it’s true. Anyone can learn to play music on a guitar, but you need something more than just the technical skills to make chords and play notes to be a Jimi Hendrix or an Eric Clapton.

Don’t let that discourage you, though. Spend time trying to look for the simplified shapes that are beneath and between the features, and do simple drawings blocking in those shapes as an exercise to help you develop your eye. Skip the rendering until you start seeing some life and likeness even in those simple shape drawings. Then follow through with whatever rendering technique you favor. Develop a strong foundation to your drawings and you’ll see your likenesses leap forward.

Thanks to Jay Higgs 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!