The Joe Bluhm Influence

In live caricature, I don't think there are any live caricature artists who've been more conspicuously influential on other live caricature artists than Joe Bluhm. I'm gonna show the top ten things that us folks do because we saw Joe do it first.

The main and biggest and most important thing is holding oneself to a sky high standard of excellence and treating the theme park as a place to do amazing art. That’s the main thing. I’ve edited these post a few times over the years. When I posted it originally, it said something to this effect, but then I felt this response from people that maybe I was kissing up too much or something, so I got self conscious about it and took the first part out, but I wish I had left it in, because it’s very important to the post, so now, too many years after the fact I want to put that back in, and I hope too many people didn’t come here, and get the idea, that Joe’s impact is just these superficial aspects. To me and everyone I know it’s so obviously completely contrary to that, but strangers might come here too, and people who aren’t as familiar with Joe’s work. Anyway, let’s carry on.

So here we go. Top ten. Joe Bluhm.

10. Big Body

Joe turned the caricature world on it's big head/little body by bringing a fresh little head/big body alternative to the table. 

In animation traditions, this is what a body looks like, and it also served as a fine go-to body for caricature artists, but of course with a much bigger head. It's a small central mass with big hands and very big feet, but not everybody's built like this so if a caricature artist can not draw this when it's conspicuously not what he's looking at, he get's bonus points.

Joe brought to live caricature a lot of illustration traditions. This is the illustration body type: a big central mass and tiny limbs and a small head. I remember the first time I saw a Joe Bluhm full body color caricature of a kid playing soccer and he had tiny little feet and I was like, of course! That's perfect. I always loathed drawing color bodies until I realized I didn't have to shoot for Mad Magazine Jack Davis anatomy necessarily–not that I was able to do anything near that.

Now, this is a big head though, but that's probably because the kid had a big head. Look at those skinny little legs. How cool!

9. Glasses Charisma

This one has two subcategories. The first is reflections. After everybody saw Joe's reflections they were like, "Dang! How can I do that? The second category is "the glasses trick," which is this:

It makes you wanna keep a thick pair of glasses at the easel and force all your customers to wear them for the duration. "The glasses trick." You know the glasses trick. I've done it countless times I shouldn't have..and I think you need a lot of realism in your drawing to pull it off so that it actually looks like something.


8. Non-Smiles

If there's no smile and the drawing is still funny than you know that it's the humor in the drawing that they are enjoying and not the humor in the customer's expression. Isolate the source of the humor, is what I'm saying. I'm joking though, but how great is this drawing!

7. The Underview

By angling the customer's face downward a little bit you can get great big Disney eyes, no chance of a pig nose, and a slender chin without having to draw a single dishonest line.

But unfortunately the rules of caricature spell out very clearly that the angle you choose is part of your statement about your subject's face and in no way arbitrary. So, if there's more important stuff, that is, if there's more interesting stuff, that is, if there's more unusual stuff, that is, if there's more risky stuff down below, but you take the up-top angle, that means your a ninny. And Joe's no ninny, is what I'm saying.

 6. Eyes Out in Front

One cool thing about caricatures is you can think you know faces and then you see a drawing exaggerating some dimension that you didn't know existed and then every face you see after that has to answer to that new dimension. 

It's like, imagine the first person who drew an eyeball. Before that, all the experts were portraying human beings as just stick figures with blank heads and punching their time card and going home to read the paper, and then some know-it-all wet-behind-the-ears rookie draws a person with an eyeball, and then all these union guys were like "well that's one more thing I gotta think about," and then after a month of griping and union meetings the kid draws a person with two eyeballs just on a whim before his lunch break, and this old timer passes by the kid's desk while he's gone, and he glances down without thinking too much and then..

Here's some examples of eyes up in front. I did an eyes up in front only a couple months ago on my drawing of Bill Burr, but he definitely has eyes up in front...but here's more examples of other artists doing it, plus one more from myself.

5. Philtrum volume

Most people don't know that the "she don't have a mustache" joke was actually not a joke at all but rather just a normal father's reaction to a caricature artist trying to indicate that space between the nose and the mouth without the proper know-how.

This is how it's done right here. It's got to be puffy. A nice puffy philtrum is the only reason you need to not draw the smile.
 
 

Mom: Smile honey! Can you draw her smile?

Artist: No, ma'am, but wait till you see this puffy philtrum!

I use to ride the middle ground a lot, have some teeth showing, but get a little philtrum in there too.

4. No Names, No Hearts, No Song and Dance

  
Mom: I have prosopagnosia, and don't call me Shirley. 

The job of the artist is to make something awesome. If they are unable to make something awesome, which is their job, the other alternative is to be cooperative and friendly which has an awesomeness to it as well, like when the restaurant makes a mistake with your order so then they bring you a free pizza and you say "AWESOME!"

3. 3/4

Yeah. I'm giving Joe credit for 3/4. I don't know. Why not?

2. Natural Lighting

 I almost put natural lighting as Joe's number one influence on live caricature. This is a big one. It's one of the most noticeably different things he does, and it is a major part of every single sketch. And even people who don't dive in full force and use a brown color stick when coloring white people will still put a little black shadow in the teeth and eyes because of Joe.

Nothin better than some natural lighting. They train us to use an imaginary light source which is a great way to create a sense of volume lickity split, but everything ends up looking a little balloony. People who do studio life drawing know that if you stay faithful to the light source and if you are patient and pure of heart, in time, volume will manifest itself.  Joe however uses natural lighting to build volume, and skin looks like skin and hair looks like hair. It's really very incredible. Part of me wishes he still worked at a theme park, you know. Somewhere, deep down, maybe..in another time..

 

1. Undersketching

   

 It's weird. The most easily quantifiable difference between Asian live caricatures and American live caricatures is, I do believe, the undersketching. I may change my mind about this, but this is just what I'm thinking now. Here in Korea, the business side of the force encourages undersketching, and in America the business side discourages it. I'm not sure why the difference, but I really think that's true.

In America the word Joe Bluhm is synonymous with undersketching. The boss will say to some rookie, "No undersketching!" and the rookie will say "but Joe Bluhm does it." and then the boss will say, "but he's Joe Bluhm, and he's amazing, and you're not amazing." Wise words indeed.

In conclusion, Joe Bluhm has been influential to many caricature artists. These are just my opinions and guesses. I don't know too much about live caricature history, but there's not much literature out there so it's mostly hearsay I think.

Thanks for coming to my blog. 

 

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.