Sunday Mailbag- Uncaricaturable?

Q: You’ve drawn so many caricatures of famous celebrities. However, has there ever been a celebrity that you were unable to draw because it was too difficult? 

A: No such thing. You can caricature anybody. How far you can push the exaggerations and how good the recognizability is is all about your observations and execution of the caricature. Some faces may be more elusive to you than others, but all are solvable. Sometimes I’ll find a caricature just rolls off the end of my pencil without much effort, and others I’ll do several sketches and try several different approaches before I am satisfied.

It’s hard to determine why a given face might be troublesome with respect to caricature. Sometimes it’s that the face in question doesn’t have much of an “identity”. By that I mean it’s the type of subject who changes their look all the time. Some actors have “rubber faces” and seem to change from role to role, or even red carpet to red carpet appearance. Part of this, especially for women, is the cosmetics they wear can dramatically change how you perceive their face. Another reason is there isn’t any readily identifiable feature(s) or expression/presence elements that you can center your caricature around. That doesn’t mean the face is undrawable, it just means you don’t have an easy path to recognizability. Some faces have what I call “delicate” features, where none are particularly dominant and getting a likeness requires a balance.

What I mostly find to be the problem when struggling to capture a caricature is that I have made a wrong choice in my observations of the subject and am trying to make my caricature work with that choice instead of stepping back and reassessing. That’s like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. If I am having trouble with a subject, I try and take that step back and approach the face with a fresh eye. I’ll do a number of smaller rough sketches to explore around with different exaggeration choices and see if I can get a “hit”. Usually once you figure out the keys to a face, the rest is nothing but technique in drawing and rendering the features.

Thanks to Andrew Caddell 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!