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.