Sunday Mailbag- How Long Does It Take?

Q: Looking at your regular caricatures, how long would it normally take to do a single pencil caricature?

A: Ah, the age old question. The answer is always: that depends.

Live Caricature

For one person in black and white graphite/shading, I usually take between 6-8 minutes to do one. That’s not very fast by live caricature artists standards, bit that’s my typical time. I can do it faster if I’m pressed or in a particular groove, say 4-5 minutes, but those are considerably less detailed. I may that up to 12-15 minutes on one if it contains a more elaborate environment or situation. Here’s a basic 6-8 minute live caricature:

Here’s one I probably spent 15 minutes on:

Sketch o’the Week Caricatures

These I spend a lot more time one. I sketch them out with light lines first then “knock down” the lines so you can barely see them, then go back in and do stronger lines and the crosshatching. I probably spend 30 minutes on just a basic head and shading:

And probably an hour or a little more on something a lot more elaborate:

A lot depends on how complicated things are to draw. Stuff like guitars take time. It also depends on how I’m drawing that day. Sometimes I’ll need to do a lot of erasing because things are not coming out of the end of my pencil they way I’d like, and sometimes things are just working.

Thanks to Graham Wye 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!