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October 24th,
2001 (picture at bottom) |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Your YouCanDraw.com every other week caricature |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| Good day all, today's "caricature" is really only a virtual caricature. I say "virtual" because it's a caricature of no one in particular. It's not intended to look like anyone and it's not a botched attempt. It's more a or less a "freestyle" take off built around a set of features in a David Levine-like cross-hatched style. (I like ink cross-hatching because it prints so well, makes for a small file, and you get all sorts of "lucky" effects where the hatching overlaps. Yes, it's tedious, but the results are worth it. So I don't want you to worry today about this looking like anybody. I have other things in mind for you to do such as: 1) evaluate for direction of light - where are the most intense shadows? - where are the most intense highlights? - do the highlights and shadow areas "make sense" - that is, are they consistent with what you can observe about the source of the light? - where there appears to be something "complicated" occurring, can you analyze what's going on in terms of lines, shadows, highlights, and underlying primitive shapes, etc.? 2) the features - in regards to Mr. Average, how do the following align: a. Where does the "middle of the eye line" fall in regard to the proportion of the rest of the face? (On Mr. Average, recall it pretty much splits the face into upper and lower halves); b. Where does the "bottom of the nose line" fall? (On Mr. Average it's a nudge above the half way point between the "middle of the eye line" and the bottom of the chin line" - actually about 2/5ths the distance down from the eye line and the chin line) c. where does the "middle of the mouth line" fall compared to 'Mr. A"? Recall in Mr. Average, the middle of the mouth - ie the place where the lips come together - falls on the first third when when you divide the distance from the bottom of the nose to the bottom of the chin into three equal parts. (What falls on the second third? Why it's the top of the chin - of course :-) d. How about vertical alignment? How do the middle of the eyes align with the outside corners of the mouth? (They line up straight north and south on Mr. A) e. And the inside corners of the eyes, do they line up vertically with the outside corners of the nose? (At the "lateral margins" of the nares / nostrils.) f. And what about the overall shape of the head? Is he a "potato head" or a "peanut head? Or a tear drop shape? (Mimicking the shape of the nose?) Pyramid maybe? Light bulb? Sphere? Cube? What do see? g. What's the overall shape of the hair and the forehead? Can you envision each as a separate shape? (Note how the actual hairline is just the "shared edge" between the two...and we could go on and on... h. For instance, how is the beard constructed? What is it about both very ordered straight lines with the occasional straggly stray line that makes the beard look like a beard? And, what is the angle of the eyes - each eye - when you go from "canthus to canthus"? i. After answering even those few questions above, how could you start exaggerating this exaggeration? Run crazy with it, do it in stick figure or simple line styles (ie do little roughs until you start getting an exaggeration that resembles today's "anonymous balding man". So that was a mini review of a few of the overall "sizing up" questions I try to ask when first approaching a caricature or drawing subject. Of course there's millions more observations you can make but those really are some of the most fundamental to warm up on. You can look at last week's upload and all of these are discussed. In fact, the entire Ani DiFranco series goes in to depth on all of these points - and a whole bunch more. Here's those links: (please be patient with me - not all the navigational links between sections are fine tuned - all will be soon): http://ycdinsiders.digitalchainsaw.com/InsidersArtistLoft/ani_difranco.htm http://ycdinsiders.digitalchainsaw.com/InsidersArtistLoft/ani_difranco_part_2.htm http://ycdinsiders.digitalchainsaw.com/InsidersArtistLoft/ani_difranco_part_3.htm And the huge one from last week: http://ycdinsiders.digitalchainsaw.com/InsidersArtistLoft/ani_difranco_part_4.htm In fact, they're all pretty huge - don't panic if they don't load right away. That's it for this week. Keep on drawing, have some fun and stay healthy! Warmly, Jeff K.
Jeffrey O. Kasbohm
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