Apologies for the epic length. I haven't posted a blog in a year, so in a way I guess I'm making up for lost time.
PROLOGUE
I've been interested in being able to produce a successful caricature since I first started dabbling in digital art a few years back but within the last nine months my quest has turned into a rabid obsession filled with frustration at every turn. With every style or technique I attempt, I look to the internet for inspiration or if I'm lucky enough, a tutorial that teaches me exactly how to pull it off. Unfortunately, when it comes to creating caricature in an image manipulation program, the great and powerful world wide web is a desolate wasteland. I did find a technique where you take a photograph and warp the subjects face, pushing and pulling, shrinking or bloating the various facial features, but to me the results are barely recognizable as a human beings, let alone decent likenesses of the original.
So, for the time being at least, I was on my own. The closest thing to my desired effect that I have achieved up to that point has been my Bobble Heads design that I did some time back and then redid recently for my portfolio project. Essentially all that consists of is heads that are oversized in relation to the bodies and some additional illustration to give it a painterly cartoon look. Unfortunately, caricature isn't about big heads, Its about the relationships of the individual features and exaggerating those relationships. So, I've never been entirely satisfied with that design(although satisfied enough to include it in the portfolio).
Then at Christmastime, I acquired two tools that I thought would deliver a miracle. I asked for, and thus received (thanks Sarah) a drawing tablet which would allow me to create lines and strokes traditionally, rather than using a clunky mouse. Then I purchased a how-to book for caricatures called Face Off by Harry Hamernik. It didn't take long for my naïve enthusiasm to be crushed by the discovery of two harsh truths. First, drawing tablets are a bitch for noobies! You've got a little 4x6 square that's supposed to translate to a 15 inch computer monitor and a stylus that's either too sensitive or not sensitive enough. It takes a lot of time to get accustomed to using it with any success and I'm known for having a short attention span. The second harsh truth, and this is a big one for someone who aspires to do an illustration, is that apparently…I CAN'T DRAW! My freehand technique is extremely lacking. I haven't taken an art class since 8th grade, but I seem to recall being somewhat good at drawing. I guess maybe since my material of interest back then was somewhat limited to nerd things like robots and spaceships I didn't realize that maybe I was a little underdeveloped when it came to sketching anything that didn't contain straight lines and sharp angles. More surprising was how shocked I was by my appalling results. I went into with full confidence that I would just crack open the book, grab the stylus, and go to town. In retrospect, maybe my less than effective sketches during countless Cranium sessions on game nights throughout the last couple of years should have foreshadowed the possibility of my level of suckitude. Thus again, my hopes for capturing the caricature, were dashed. The book wound up on the shelf after reading it cover to cover and the drawing tablet rarely saw any action.
More recently, however, the websites of 2 extraordinary caricature artists have renewed my thirst for victory. Joe Bluhm has a blog as well as a digital podcast where you can watch videos of him creating his pieces from start to finish or various stages of rendering. He has some fantastic likenesses of Tom Cruise(Hail Xenu), Kanye West(sucks), and one of my favorite actors of all time, Bill Murray. His work is far more advanced than what I could ever hope, but continues to be a source of inspiration. I watch the same videos over and over, since he's so in demand that he rarely posts new podcasts. Tom Richardson is an artist for MAD Magazine and he blogs pretty much daily about the business and his projects. Even better, he has some of those elusive tutorials I've been looking for with little success. He, too, is beyond the scope of the humble effect I'm looking to achieve but…someday.
After finally completing the painstaking process of putting together a portfolio for a possible job prospect, my nerding time as I call it, is once again free. And so this week ,I set out to slay the beast once and for all.
A LESS THAN STELLAR BEGINNING
Caricature is about exaggerating the unique features of one's face. The flaws that distinguish you from some kind of perfect cookie-cutter looking god-like creature. Seeing that there's no face whose flaws I am more familiar with than my own, I decided to use myself as the subject(as I usually always do anyway). Here is the picture from which I am working. In hindsight, I could have chosen a picture with a more friendly face, but I'm often frowning. Maybe that'll lend more to the likeness in the end. Plus I can't smile for posed pictures. Ask around. It's a thing.
I started by doing a quick character study, roughly sketching out the relationships that I perceive the various parts of my face to have with one another. I also jotted little notes to myself as reminders of what features to accentuate or minimize. Any caricature of me, I think, would of course need to lead with the nose. I also made a point to accentuate the brows. There's something going on there that makes it appear as if its perpetually arched. I don't know what it is but it's a trait I inherited from my late grandfather and I like it.
Then as the experts suggested, I reduced everything to the basic shapes and exaggerated those shapes to head in the direction I wanted. Each element of my sketch would be within on or around those shapes. With the straight lines and hard angles this would probably also serve as a good basis if I wanted to return to the nerdy days of my youth and make a robot version of myself.
Now the difficult part: Getting back on the horse. I tried to channel Joe Bluhm and sketch it all out on the digital tablet but, no big surprise, I still suck at it. So I decided to print out the basic shapes image slap a blank sheet over it and sketch it the old fashioned way with a pencil. The result was even worse than my attempt with the tablet. In the spirit of comedy, I attach said sketch.
Discouraged I wadded up the sketch and gave up. I decided my time would be better served on something else that I'd postponed while working on the portfolio - playing The Bourne Conspiracy. I soon found that I suck at that too.
THE BREAKTHROUGH
It plagued my sleep that night, and I awoke at 7AM feeling artistic but having all but given up on the caricature project. Rather than do what I should, and delve into the new Creative Photoshop book I purchased recently, for some reason I found myself playing around with the comic book style that I'd used on a few designs earlier in the year. I never liked the one I had done of myself so I wanted to give it another try. Coincidentally, I chose to work off of the same reference photo I had used for the caricature. I played with that for most of the day, all the while ignoring this little "what if?" tingling somewhere in the back of my brain. When I finished, I was happy with the line art but was disgruntled when the coloring process made it turn out like some kind of police sketch of a serial killer. For some reason, as I was just about to redo the coloring from scratch, I decided to listen to the annoying little kernel of an idea that I had been tuning out, the "what if?" What if… I use the comic book style to render the line art rather than draw it freehand, then manipulate it afterwards to fit my desired exaggerations? You wouldn't think it a terribly out of the box solution, certainly not one that would have eluded me for 6+ months. Actually, I had thought of it before. I just didn't think it would work. I was certain that it would turn out just as the warped photos I mentioned above, freakish and unrecognizable.
I decided to give it a try, but rather than manipulating the entire line art face, I would experiment with handling each separate element (nose, eyes, mouth etc.) individually. For example narrowing the head shape at the bottom while widening it at the top would have no effect whatsoever on the eyes. I even went so far as to break the face into hemispheres, so that if need be the right eye could differ from the left and so on. I began by creating each element with in a style similar to the comic book approach, but I made the lines more stylized and simple. Then I assembled the elements using the same basic shapes image I had made the night before. Manipulated each element as needed and voila…
I was pleasantly surprised with the results. My jaw and chin are more angular so I made some changes and then applied the base colors. It's a work in progress. I still need to render the shadows and highlights to make it more 3-dimensional(yet another process I have yet to perfect). I'll also do more of the body, at least a neck and collar. "NO FLOATING HEADS", the experts always say.
So all and all, in my opinion at least, its a success. Its more of the cartoony style of Hamernik rather than the more life like style of Joe Bluhm and Tom Richmond, but I'll attempt those after I play with this style some more. I'm curious to know what other people think. Is it a good likeness of me? Feel free to voice your opinions.
