Sunday Mailbag- Live Caricature Mistakes?

Q:  You’ve mentioned the thrill of drawing live caricatures 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: Drawing live is a spontaneous and organic process that has to be allowed to run its course, warts (pun intended) and all. No two drawings are ever alike, even if I were to draw the same person twice and make the same choices both times the end results will be a bit different… that’s just the nature of spontaneous live drawing. So the nose being a little bigger in one or the eyes being a little less squinty or whatever is not going to break the final result. The only thing that does that is if I were to make some bad/wrong choices or draw some features badly that will blow the likeness. If a drawing is really going off the rails I will do some things to fix it:

Start over– Actually this is the most common solution for a drawing that’s gone wrong. It’s not really much of a time waster because I start with the eyes, nose and mouth, and as such I can usually tell within the first 30 seconds of a drawing if I’ve messed up enough to really compromise the caricature. Then I’ll start over. However since no one likes it when the crowd taunts you for screwing up and beginning again, I have a way to excuse the new start. Since I use a leadholder and graphite to do the drawing, I angle my pencil a bit and press down hard on the side of the protruding piece of lead. This causes the lead to loudly snap, the end piece to go flying, digs a groove into the paper and spatters graphite dust on the drawing. Then I accuse the model of “breaking my pencil with their face” and grab a new sheet. It gets a laugh and I am off the hook for starting over.

Work around it- One of the nice things about starting from the inside out on a caricature is I can make adjustments on the fly to fix something I may have messed up on. Say I drew someone’s eyes too far apart. I can make the face bigger to compensate. Sometimes you make a spectacular over the shoulder, fully extended, at the wall catch in center field to save the game.

Erase- I know I say no erasing but if I am near the end of a drawing and the issue I see is a small one, maybe one eye is a little too high or the nose needs to be rounder or something simple, I will erase and redraw that part. It’s tough to erase the lines I put down because they are very dark and I press pretty hard, but it can be done.

I go days and days without needing to do any of that, though. You can look at almost any finished drawing and think you could have done this better or that different, but again that is the nature of live work.

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!