Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Caricatures

I went down to the college campus with Ed Abernathy today, and we drew a bunch of caricatures.  Here are mine (click to enlarge) --



I definitely need to work on my caricaturing skills, if I ever want to call myself a proper caricaturist.  This one of Wallace is nice, though. I decided to start using one gray marker today, and I think it worked out pretty well.


I love to use my favorite brush pen, but I keep smearing it.  I guess I'll have to either be really careful, or else start using a less smeary brand for caricatures.  I hated giving people these messy pictures with my fingerprints all over them.

The best one of the day:

Thanks for a fun time, kids!

6 comments:

Garth Potts said...

Great job, Chris! Did you use that brush marker I gave you?

Chris_Garrison said...

Yes, I love that brand now (the Staedtler mars graphic 3000 duo). But for some reason, I kept smearing them on these caricatures, I guess because I was trying to hurry. For the gray, I just used a Prismacolor Cool Gray 30% marker.

Anonymous said...

Nice.. I find your approach interesting because it's so different from mine. You try to find the cartoon symbol/essence of people, IMO, whereas I do more like "life drawing" but try to warp & exaggerate the features somewhat (in general I mean; sometimes I'm more abstract/simplified, just as you sometimes draw something more "drawn" and less "essence-seeking".)

Was that a cell-phone or an actual camera? I often regret not having a camera on hand.. Occasionally the things I draw at events are better than things I come up with as samples or more "finished" work. (Or so I will claim since no one will ever know.)

The gray's a good idea. I guess I've thought about that, not sure why I never tried it. One can certainly get into a lot of trouble trying to create gray values out of hatch lines.. Good lord, the troubles I've known trying to shade peoples' caricatures with a series of thin parallel lines..

How's Ed? What would Ed's report of the day be? I need to give Ed a call some time. Did he ever solve that word puzzle he was stuck on a few weeks ago?

-Tim Rocks

Chris_Garrison said...

Yeah, my new theory of caricature is that anatomy is the enemy of comedy, and so I want to get away from bone structure and stuff that I usually accidentally get bogged down in. I didn't go as far with that notion this time as I wanted to, so next time I'll have to try harder.

I think shoulders are very boring and anatomical, so I might try to develop a style that only rarely allows shoulders. Torsos, yes, but sans shoulders. Unless it's a super-shouldery football player, or super-sexy-bare-shouldered lady.

I didn't get any pictures from that wedding reception I did, so this time I used my camera phone. It worked out well, because we were outdoors on a bright day.

I don't know about Ed's puzzle troubles, ha ha. But I think the day went well for both of us. He was pretty chipper, for Ed.

A Koszis said...

Those are some interesting ideas about caricaturing. I actually like shoulders but maybe I can try that out in order to mix things up a little. I want to practice a little bit with drawing actual people since whenever someone learns that I have any drawing talent they ask me to draw them. Like being a cartoonist and a caricature artist are automatically the same thing.

Captain Hooks said...

Those are all sooo good. I like the second one the most. I've always wanted to just set up on campus and do free caricatures.