Sunday Mailbag- Realism?

Q: Do you ever create non-cartoon/caricature drawings such as portraits or landscapes? If so, how do you manage to shift gears so drastically?

A: Very seldom these days.

The art college I went to had no cartooning classes. Occasionally in one of my illustration classes I would be able to get away with doing a cartoon image for a certain project, but that was mostly frowned upon. I was trained in classic drawing and painting instead. This actually helped my cartooning (in my opinion) as it forced me to develop my drawing skills, and when I then turned back to cartooning I think my skills were the better for it.

Early on it was hard to switch between realism and caricature. After my first summer doing theme park caricatures I came back to college and had a portraiture class. I was doing what I THOUGHT was a realistic portrait and my instructor took one look and said “that’s a caricature”. I begged to differ, and then did a theme park style caricature of the model to demonstrate. He said “there are degrees of caricature. This second drawing is more exaggerated but your attempt at a portrait is still a caricature.”

He was right actually. It took a good portion of the school year for me to get my head back to a place that could do a realistic drawing of a human face. Eventually I was able to do either on demand.

For a while I used to go to a local life drawing co-op where we all threw $5 into a coffee can to cover the costs of the model (and some coffee) and I’d spend three hours doing realistic figure drawing. It was a way to relax and to get away from the non-stop cartooning for a while. It’s been many years since I did that. I would guess I’d have to work at it to do a really realistic drawing of anything these days.

I have very little of that realistic style work to show as example, but here’s a few. These are old scans I found and the drawings are probably 20 years old. The sketch paper was so thin you can see the drawings on the other side of the sheet in the scans:

Thanks to Dave Snyder 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!