Sunday Mailbag- Still Do Live Caricatures?

Q: Do you ever do live caricatures anymore?

A: Not very often. I spent 20 plus years doing them five to six days a week at seasonal theme parks (only during the summers), and while I credit those years and the tens of thousands of faces I drew for developing my eye for caricature, I do not miss that scene. I much prefer to work in my climate controlled studio where the music is both good and at a comfortable volume and there are no mosquitoes, rainstorms, or people with nacho cheese breath dribbling Dipping Dots down my back while they ask where the bathrooms are.

All that said on the few occasions I do draw live, when I have to fill in for someone at the park or do a company event because we need more artists than we have available, I still enjoy the drawing part. There is something magical about live drawing, which is totally spontaneous, reactive drawing. I still tell people interested in doing caricature of any kind to try their hand at live work, because there is no better way to develop your eye for expression and “presence” than to do quick, instinctual drawings of face after face like that.

Live caricature is like gestural figure drawing. The best way to learn to draw the figure is not to do labored, three hour poses of a reclining figure. It is to draw quick, 15-30 second studies of the body in natural poses. None of those drawings are ever going to hang in the Louvre, but that’s not the point. These quick studies develop your eye and instincts with the figure… how it leans, how weight is distributed, etc. Those instincts translate into more finished work later. Live caricature does the same for likeness, exaggeration, and expression.

The one unfortunate thing is that live work has a “cosmetic” nature to it that is only achieved and maintained by constantly doing it. The quality of the lines, getting them to go where you want them to go, developing that “rhythm” that makes the linework sing… that’s a skill that quickly goes away without constant practice. It’s like shooting baskets. You practice and practice shooting baskets until you stop thinking about the mechanics, or even aiming, and just shoot the ball. It goes in time and time again. Then if you stop practicing for a few months and go back to it, the ball clanks off the rim all the time. It’s the same ball, the same basket, the same hands doing the shooting, but it’s not working like it did. You lost the touch. Same with live caricature work. I am never happy with any of my live drawings these days. I do not do it enough to quite get the “touch” back.

I still recommend doing live work as much as you can when you are learning to draw caricatures. Volunteer to draw at your local school festival or do them at your town fair. It’s great practice and a unique dynamic that really pays off in your work.

Thanks to R.D. Griffin 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!