By Ben Coomber
So you want to draw funny face’s? Make people laugh, push the boundries etc? Well Caricatures is where it’s at for that. There are two sides to the caricatures and in this tutorial I will try to cover both.
Seeing
Now before we even start writing about how to draw caricature we should really get in to how to see a caricature. Every now and then someone will sit down in front of you with the most distinct character filled face ever. These people are called gifts because in most cases they are quite easy to caricature. It’s the people with not so distinctive faces that are the dificult ones to draw.
It could be that simply they have a huge nose or maybe their eyes are really tiney it all depends on what you see. I would reccomend starting off simply, picking and choosing maybe 1 or 2 things to exaggerate because it can be difficult to keep everything in proporation with whilst exagerating the features.
Currently I take about a minute to observe the customer while building in my guides and then work from there for the line work, some people can do what I do in 30 seconds and even quicker than that, practice makes perfect.
It will probably take you a good 3-400 drawings before you start seeing noticably good cariactures, you have to work out the bad ones in you and this will happen over time, so don’t threat, strive on and all will fall in to place eventually.
The Triangle Method
There are several different methods for creating a caricature and none of them are worse or better than the next. I am going to talk to you about the one I use which is called the Triangle method.
Essentially we start off by drawing a triangle in the centre of the face, this joins up the outside edge of the eyes with the base of the nose. Below is an example picture:
Old pic of youthful man lol (complete with college timetable in the back)
From here we then see where the weight lies on the face, does the person have a big forehead? Or do they have a massive chin it all varies. Depending on where the weight lies will help me decide what I am going to exagerate.
Weight of the face.
The weight on my face is sort of balanced but only slightly, only the bottom so I think I will stretch out the bottom of the face and leave the space between my hair and my forhead quite small. Big eyes, wide nostrel and big lips. A thin face to balance out the mass as no face has infinite mass to play around with.
I would start at the nose and work from there, working towards the eyes to setup a basis of a framework. After this I moved on to the mouth to setup the final part of th internal face. After this I worked on the outside of my face to finish it off and then added all the extra bits n bobs and voila.
So Below are is the final piece that I came out with, it was a quick sketch, I feel that the likeness is still there and that I hit the mark on the lips and the eyes.
Ben's Caricature
Written by Ben Coomber from Coomber’s Carix
Currently Ben is preparing to work at events and should be completely set up by the end of September 2011. If you would like to hire a little something different for your party please feel free to get in touch. Failing that Ben knows a few other caricaturists who would be happy to make you a quote. Find Ben on facebook.
