The Shape of Shapes to Come

Don't worry. It's not this...

  which still could be a reject. If you'd of told me eight years ago that I'd be doing caricatures that look like this now I would have said "Get outa town!... How could I ever achieve such a washed out front-lighting in a live caricature?" And you would have answered, "—but this is from a photo." And I would have replied, "Well, if that's what it's gonna come to...so be it."

When I was trained in caricatures, the first order of business was to draw straight parallel lines that gradated smoothly from thick to thin and back again like this.

I had to do pages and pages before I could advance to the next exercise which was pom poms.

Pom poms would form the foundation for how to draw hair

 and obviously pom poms. A day and a half might have been spent, practicing line quality in this way and familiarizing myself with the marker before I was introduced to representational forms in the form of forms showing mouth forms and nose forms.

(not actual form)

This was the part I had been looking formward too. This was the training that wasn't available at art school. I was given a page of eyes shapes. There were about 10 or so cartoon eyes I would copy over and over; then mouths; then noses, and finally face shapes which included also the ears and hair. 

(not actual form)

And the next step was where it really became fun.  I had to use the shapes to invent faces, and also I was to sit down stray children for free demos and find ways to force their faces into the forms. Of course I was permitted and encouraged to change up the shapes, but I wanted my caricature to look like "the live caricature style" which I always had a great admiration for, so I would ask my trainer for new shapes which he would kindly give me, and at one point I approached a caricature phenom who worked at our park and asked if he could show me some of his shapes, but he sort of laughed the question off, and I realized that I could learn some of his shapes by simply looking at his caricatures. Stupid question. Stupid! Stupid!

  After I built up a good shape vocabulary, I began experimenting with exaggeration, which to me, at that time, meant looking for the most unusually large dimensions and making them larger which is pretty much how it works. And, I must add that I would veer from my shape sets whenever I saw a different more correct or concise way to represent something. So I saw shapes and exaggeration as being two different things:

the shapes

The bank of features that you have in your head.  A specific shape should be drawn in accordance with it being perceived/felt in the customer's face.

the exaggeration 

The stretching of the shapes, interestingly, also to be done in accordance with it being perceived/felt in the customer's face.

  But what do you stretch a shape too? You stretch it to a shape, and if the viewer makes a connection in his brain between that shape and the face of the subject than likeness has been achieved, at least as far as that shape is concerned. So it's all shapes. I'm tellin' you. 

  For instance what if somebody looks like this guy?

Then, well by golly, that's what we want to show. This drawing is by the immensely cool Basil Wolverton. A live caricature artist has all kinds of stuff like this in his head, and he yearns for the right opportunity to bust it out. 

And this is a shape too. so..yeah..it's all shapes and exaggeration and who knows waht.

 

But Rather Just Like

 There's no love like stinky love.

A dark brown background can help make your colors pop out a bit. Chroma contrast. I learned that back in college. There's supposedly three dimensions to color: Value, Chroma, and hue. Do you know about this? Value is the difference between black and white; chroma is the difference between red and gray, and hue is the difference between red and green, or yellow and purple—or any opposing sides on the color wheel. When I was a little kid I remember asking my mom if a color has an opposite and she said no, but later on I figured she was wrong because the opposite of red is green. But she wasn't wrong, because green is only opposite if you're talking about red hue, and I wasn't.. Let us continue.

 This caricature feels like safety.

  This caricature feel like doorknob. These girls were too fun and cool and down for whatever.

Selling a caricature with acne is always a victory.

  Hair near the eyes is a bother to draw. What are some other bothers to draw? I will list them:

  complex eye brows
  ears
  long hair that was just up in a pony tail moments ago
  identical twins
  hanging roller-coasters
  motorcycles. Alright that's enough.

 She looks like Kenny Banya.

   Fun Korean couple. The girl was a little huffy after it all, but I'd be huffy too if someone botched my baseball implants.

  Not to toot my own horn, but they looked just like this..and probably still do.

   I think she asked for pretty, but they always ask for pretty. What am I? The beauty doctor?

   It's not everyday you get to draw conjoined twins. This couple was cool. They really seemed to be conjoining themselves.

  Maybe she was a wicked Irish devil. Maybe he was an all American church softball heart-throb, none of that was important. All that was important was their love. And so she climbed up the ladder of his arm and kicked him in the face.

  She complained about it a lot, but she got a frame. This is the spam face-shape, not to be confused with the soap face-shape which is horizontal. I think next week I'll do a thing about shapes. I have some ideas.

  The elephant's foot face shape. You'd be surprised how many Asians don't look like Asians but rather just like funny looking white people.

 

  Frame!...I'll tell ya... the trick to selling a frame is to draw a lot of minus symbols. It makes them think they're getting some kinda discount.

Well, this is a framer too, actually. Bust my buttons!

  I got her pretty good on this one. She wouldn't let me take her photo so that's how you know.

  This girl had some eye surgery done. I can tell. She kind of looks like a villainous queen. I don't think he liked this sketch too much. The drawing before this was very very um..shall I say..cautious, but he was cool though.

  Surely, there's a place in caricature for structure and solidity, but I got a warm spot, I must say, for some stray lines floating around like some endoplasmic reticulums.

 

It's Just Bills

  

  This post is the sequel to A Hodge Podge of Mannliness which featured drawings of Bill Murray and Bill Hicks. Here, above, is Bill O'Reilly. He's always fun to watch. WE'LL DO IT LIVE! That's his catch phrase. Fox News is fun stuff. It's one of those things. Either you LOVE it or you HATE it. It's very controversial.

  And here's Bill Maher, a polarizing political figure if ever there were one. He always looks like he's got some wiseacre thing to say. His face fits his persona perfectly. Also, he's got a New York socialite mullet. Also he looks like Christian Bale trick-or-treating as a treasure troll.

  Post internet Bill Clinton is the Bill Clinton who got confrontational with this goofy looking Fox news guy. It really does feel too entertaining to be real. Ah, but I guess it is a little tame compared to Jones and Morgan if you know what I mean..., but for it just being Bill Clinton and a goofy looking guy it's a pretty lively exchange. 

  I think of two things when I think of post Internet Bill Cosby. I think of Pokemon and I think of a tough old man criticizing black culture as it's portrayed in the media. Here's some sketches I did. I was gonna just post the top one, but then I decided that if I showed the whole page you could just soak it all in.

And the last Bill is Bill Burr. He's an ordinary everyday guy in his comedy. He's like "Hey, I mean come on, people." Maybe his persona is so extreme in the direction of "Hey, I mean come on, people" that maybe he's exactly the opposite in his private home life. The exact opposite is "Ho, I don't mean go off, animals." Makes you think. I like his face a lot. It has a really interesting feel. Not necessarily in this drawing, but in the videos I see of him, Bill has the vibe of a cute little Norman Rockwell kid wearing a big football helmet made of flesh. 

Thanks, friends. Come back next week. I believe I'm gonna focus on Korean plastic surgery which should be interesting and hopefully disgusting.

Some Approaches

  It's a caricature of a photo I drew for some cool customers. It maybe took almost an hour. Had they come back in half an hour, it woulda took half an hour. My new thought when I draw from a photo is to try to just make sure it looks like this specific photo I'm looking at and no other photo. Why should I worry about the likeness of the individual If I don't get to see the individual? (Apart from a desire to please the customer, of course. But my thought is that if I really get all the nooks and interest of the photo, surely they'll be pleased.)Yay!

So that was my vision for drawing from a photo, but then..it may have been the very next day, I did this one. I'll tell you what happened. I did a live caricature for some real nice Chinese people and it was real cartoonish so then they asked me if I could draw their dog from a photo, and I thought it looked like a fun lil pooch so I drew the shape as such, but then I was like, I'm gonna be faithful to the colors in the photo, but that was a mistake if I do say so.

   Ick. Look at the poo stain near the heart. Failure. Regret..and the blue spot..and the orange spot..So bad... But it's from a photo...and it's a dog.

Not from a photo. Fat kid. He liked it. He was cool.

  Ahh. This coulda been way better. He had an awesome face and the lighting was hitting him perfect–ah and he had a small head. I coulda made this way funnier if I hadn't of got caught up in some the lighting things; if I'd have held on to the bigger issues. I think his nose could have been the main thing, but I wanted to get the lighting but it woulda maybe been scary to have such a big space with potentially difficult lighting. You'll notice how ambiguous the lighting on the nose is compared to the rest of the face. I jumped on some lighting situations but I think it's more important to keep the mass of the forms in mind perhaps.

I was happy with this one, and they really enjoyed it too. The likeness were good and I liked how the color relationships came out. I got her hair color good and her skin was very light and grayed down compared to his peachy skin color and I got that.

  For how long this took (which wasn't all that long) the reaction was a little lacking, but they liked it. Actually, yeah, they did laugh and like it and all that, but I thought this was gonna be a real kaboom of a reaction, but not quite. 

You'll notice that the drawings have all been about color stick...ahhh except for the previous one, but this next one is a lot more in the good spot for me conceptually speaking. I made fun of her big legs. I did a weird thing with the cheek. It looks like an illustration. A couple regrets. I should have made her mouth much smaller. It would have been funnier, but I got a little caught up in the moment and my feeling was like, if the mouth is more open it's funnier, but she had some big bulky faceness that was compromised by widening the mouth..but you'll never know cuz I didn't take her photo MUHAHAHA!!

Awfully cutesy though

And this is the best reaction in the bunch, actually.

I like the hat. This is a blurry photo huh?

Saemee at the computer

  I found an amazing photography portrait artist named Robert Wilson, and I tried to draw his awesome photo of Kevin Spacey. It's really fun to draw from an awesome photo and not care about what it ends up looking like, but the down side is that when I'm finished I usually don't end up liking what it looks like, and when it's all said and done in the long run, I didn't take the photo..but then it's not my face either.

  This is Jin. I posted a bunch of her before.

Lulu and Yung Eun. They went to the caricature convention this year so you may have met them. He won an award for Retail Style. Congratuations, big fella!

  And here's a pretentious markerless approach I tried on her. I know it's blurry. If you're trying to spot where the likeness issues are it's her bottom lip area. If I cover that up, I can see her in there.

  In conclusion, let me say, there are many different approaches to caricature.. and also to life. Thank you.

Culture Clash

   In the olden times, a well learned Englishman would travel to some God forsaken corner of the globe, and there he would sip tea on the veranda of the bungalo overlooking the rainforest, and there, he would write about the things he sees – the strange cultures, the strange people, the bizarre religions. My last name is "Philby." I may well be related to the famous British spy by the name of Philby. I may have that white anglo business in my blood where I have to look out upon the world and classify it. Maybe that's what Modernism is. I think I got a Modernist streak in my blood. I wanna show you what Korea feels like. It feels very odd sometimes. Rightfully so, it was cut off from the western world until only very recently. Sometimes I think the men I see walking around are like what my grandpa must have been when he was doing his thing. Most Korean working men wear baggy suits like you see in old photos from the 1940s. They smoke. They drink. They work. Mom takes care of the kids. 

  They sleep on the subway.

That's Saemee. (bad likeness though)

  Korea has a gritty feel to it, with the spitting and the smoking and the drunks and the motorcycles speeding through stoplights and zigzagging down sidewalks around hunchback old ladies pulling towering loads of garbage behind them. 

  By contrast, the entertainment is emotional and romantic and feminine. And everybody seems to be on the same page with what good music is, and the answer is K-Pop singers. The answer is a young couple with guitars singing about being in love, or a girl gyrating on stage, singing about being in love, and every song has a hip hop break. 

  In America, at least when I was growing up, music was about finding some strangeness that you enjoy but nobody else ever heard of. I thought that was just the norm, but shortly after I arrived here, I asked a fellow artist if she liked K-Pop, it being one of the few things I'd heard of that had to do with Korea. I expected "Haha no. Just cuz I'm Korean doesn't mean I like K Pop," but her answer was yes. And then, naturally, my next question is do you like dog meat which got a "no." 

  So Koreans like feminine music like this rather than masculine music like this, and on their tv dramas there's always an old lady crying and some guy calming her down. If it's a talk show there's sound effects and instant replays and special effects to emphasize what the person's talking about and there's always somebody breaking into song.  Koreans like cutesy stuff, and they must have high likeness tolerances because they don't loom over your shoulder like "how's this con man gonna make me think he drew my daughter in five minutes with no pencil?" A lot of times they go over and sit on a bench and wait for you to finish. But this drawing has nothing to do with all that because this is some Chinese people.

 But you will notice some hearts and some bounciness. When you see her photo, you're not gonna think it looks like her, but...but..it wasn't so far off as all that.

  

and this is a Japanese couple – caricature artists, Gota and Genki. They are kind and lovely and talented.

I wanted to post this bit about drawing from photos, but it's way to unrelated so I may do that next time. Until then, go back to whatever you were doing.