Tom’s Daily Coronacature- Ian Holm!

Here’s my take on the (very recently) late actor Sir Ian Holm.

When I teach my workshops I talk a lot about how caricature is about capturing/exaggerating someone’s “presence” as much as their features. In fact, the features are just the medium we use to describe a subject as a person. The meat and bones are just inanimate tissue without the personality and presence of the person to animate it. That is why really good impressionists can actually resemble the people they are impersonating without any makeup… they mimic the facial expressions of the subject as well as their voice, and even though the impressionist does not look anything like the person they are impersonating, you will think “wow! That’s so-and-so’s look!”. That’s presence.

When I do work for MAD, I’m not really caricaturing the actor but the CHARACTER that actor is playing. Yes, the physical features are important… you can’t act your way out of having a big nose, but really versatile actors do change their presence and look with a role. A caricature of Mike Myers the person is going to be different than a caricature of Mike Myers as Austin Powers… and not just because of the fake teeth.

This is a caricature of Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, not Ian Holm. I’d probably have made some different choices if I was just drawing him outside the role.