Caricature

I’m working on product branding that will require a series of emotional caricatures.

To be honest, I’ve never really been very good at caricature. I find it difficult to capture all the subtle nuances of the subject without just adding a lot of detail. So my drawings end up looking alright… but nothing like the people I’m trying to capture.

Fortunately, my work next week mostly just requires stylised cartoon imagery. So it doesn’t really demand that the image is identifiable as a specific person. Also, it’s all going to be lightly stylised only (no heavy caricatures) meaning that it’s a little more like stuff I’m a bit better at. πŸ˜€

Anyhow, here are some practise sketches that I did yesterday and today.

It’s me!… kinda:

I emphasised the wrong visual cues in this one: my face isn’t really super thin, and my hair is big in a different way. It’s also the wrong sort of smile (“huh?” rather than “hey”). Gah… moving on… here’s the work-in-progress if anyone is interested. I find it easiest to sketch different colours for different surfaces (eg. hair) and then break it out into layers later on:

After deciding that I’m probably too close to me to be objective in drawing myself, I went through some old photos looking for other interesting faces. I decided upon this photo of Tone doing the “Blue Steel” look (from Zoolander) at iParty 2.0. I tried for fewer, cleaner lines, and basic blocky shading:

Then I added in some colour:

Better I think… but I’m still not really feeling the emotion. I can probably add some spin lines or other iconographic elements in the background, but I want to get as much as I can from just the main figure…

I guess that I’ll just have to keep practising! πŸ˜‰

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