Sunday Mailbag- Illustration Approach?

Q: You’ve said that when you do live caricatures, you draw features in a specific order, starting with the eyes. I’m curious whether you have a similar approach when you “flesh out” the caricatures in your illustrations, or do you first work with the head shapes and body outlines since the character placement is as important as the caricature itself? Or does your process vary from project to project, depending on how many caricatures the project requires and how restricted your layout is?

I ask because I’m trying to develop a workflow of my own, but I know that sometimes you get better results when using a method that is, at first, uncomfortable. You offered a logical explanation for starting with the left eye when doing live caricatures, so it made sense that you’ve based your illustration process on similar logic. And I can learn from that too.

A: I always start with rough sketches of the head shape and figure as well as the rest of the environment they are going to be depicted in when doing anything in the studio. This would include a panel for a MAD parody, a single illustration image, or even one of my weekly sketches. That’s not just because, as you say, the composition of an illustration is as important (it is). It’s because the best way to do a caricature is to construct it from the ground up, and that means starting with the head shape and working out your choices for exaggerating the relationships of the basic features before getting tighter with the drawing.

The live caricature process you mentioned, where I start with the left eye, then go to the right one, then the nose, etc., is only for efficiency and speed, not really for good drawing. In fact I don’t really start with the left eye when I do a live drawing. I start with the head shape just like I do in the studio, I just don’t make any marks on the paper. I start my live caricature drawing in my head, visualizing the head shape and the “T” shape (the eyes and nose together) and then start my drawing with that as a guide. The necessary spontaneity and quickness of a live drawing means what actually comes out on the paper will be a little different, but that’s part of the magic and immediacy of live work.

In the studio I am under no such constraints, so I do more of my thinking on the paper. I can take my time to work the caricature out at that “under” level before I start my rendering of the features.

Thanks to Mike Southern from Kernersville, NC 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!