how to draw caricature

What is caricature?

A portrait. A caricature The key difference between caricature and drawing a portrait of someone is the intentional distortion of the subject in caricature. This distortion is difficult because the features of the subject are what makes the subject recognizable, when you start fooling around with these features, then you run the risk of loosing the likeness of the subject. So in order to keep the likeness you must minimize features that are minimized on the subject and maximize the features that are maximized on the subject. If you go against the grain and minimize a person's large mouth you will loose the likeness. Who ever heard of a drawing of Mick Jagger with small lips and mouth? Or Jay Leno with a small little baby chin? It just wouldn't look like Jay or Mick. What is caricature? Here's a dictionary definition of caricature: caricature (kr-k-chr, -chr) n.  1. A representation, especially pictorial or literary, in which the subject's distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.  2. The art of creating such representations.  3. A grotesque imitation or misrepresentation: The trial was a caricature of justice. Being able to draw portraits of people and knowing and understanding the human face is pretty central to being able to draw a caricature of someone. All the techniques taught in the DRAWING PEOPLE section of this website can be applied to caricature with some additions to the technique. For these caricaturing lessons, I'm going to assume that you already can draw a portrait, or at least, that you've looked at the DRAWING PEOPLE section of this site. We're pretty much concerned with the "artistic" definition when we say caricature on this website. Let me say a few things about what I see a caricature as: First, let's learn how to say the word caricature. It's pronounced CARE - ick - ah - chur. Or if you're British: CAR - ick- ah- chah. Click to see a larger version. I think caricatures and cartoons are the same thing. The difference between the two that I see is this: a caricature is simply a cartoon of someone or something that the viewer can recognize as a specific someone or something. As soon as someone known by the viewer is seen in a cartoon, it becomes a caricature. Here's an example to the right. This is a cartoon of a basketball. If you take that basketball and draw a stovepipe hat on it and give it a beard, it goes from a cartoon of a basketball to a caricature of Abraham Lincoln. It's recognizable as Lincoln even though it doesn't have a face. But the addition of "Lincoln-like" props give the basketball a recognizability as Lincoln. To confuse the issue, a caricature doesn't necessarily have to be a cartoon, it could be a painting, or a sculpture, or even a photograph. You could draw what you thought was a portrait, but if the proportions are incorrect, but it was still recognizable as the person you were drawing, then it could be seen as a caricature. I think a caricature is a caricature if the artist intends it to be a caricature regardless of how it was made. On this website I'm going to teach how I create caricatures. So the definition of caricature that will work for this website is the one that says that caricatures are intentionally skewed portraits of people drawn in a somewhat cartoony style, because that's how I do it.

Caricature style

This site is intended for people who want to learn how to draw caricatures. There are many styles of doing caricatures, but the only style I can effectively teach is my own. My style comes from a love of drawing portraits and cartoons, so my style is sort of a cartoony-portrait style. I really think it will help if you know a little bit about drawing people in a "straight" way before you start messing them up in a caricature. So if you'd like a course in DRAWING PEOPLE, check out that section of this site. An example of my style: Elvis. The style of caricature that I've developed is a "quick" style. I try to get as much detail in the drawing as possible with as few lines as possible. I spent many years drawing caricatures for people where I worked on a per-drawing basis, so the more I drew the more money I made. I was able to draw a complete caricature of one person in under 10 minutes. So, because of that, my style evolved into something that (I hope) looks finished, but not rushed. This is the style that I will teach. I will go through caricaturing step by step and I encourage you to follow along and do the drawings as you read about them. Copy the lines I show you and copy the caricatures I draw. Try and mimic my style, but I strongly encourage you to develop your own style of drawing. Take what you like about what I teach, but disregard anything you don't like or disagree with. Draw your own lines and shapes and shade them how you like. Study my caricature style, but also study other caricature artists and take what you like about their style as well.

visualizing caricatures

Study as many faces as you can. In order to do a good caricature you have to know and understand what it is you're drawing. Look at pictures of people in magazines and look at your family photo albums. Stare at people as you pass them on the street. Look at faces and see if you can visualize a caricature of that face. Study your subject. Look at the face from as many angles as you can. This is why drawing from life - when the person being drawn is sitting right in front of you - is infinitely easier than drawing from a two dimensional photograph. Being able to see the person "in the round" is best because you can get a "whole" sense of the person, rather than a two dimensional sense that some photographer gives you. You may be handed a photo of Jay Leno shot from above his head which would make his noggin look huge and his chin look small. The resulting caricature would be pretty nasty. Find as many photos of your subject as possible and try and get a sense of what they really look like. Notice the facial features in relation to one another. Does the hair recede and thus make the forehead look huge? Do they have an overbite and thus make the chin look small? Do their ears stick out unusually far from their head? Do their eyes seem too close together? Are their eyes horizontally aligned? (have you looked at Shannon Doherty's eyes?) Is their nose hooked or does it curve upward? After this intense study, try to visualize a completed caricature in your head. Here's a basic question you may be asking: "How do I know which features to exaggerate on the face?" Try and visualize caricatures in your head. Here's an answer: You'll know by looking at a face. If you have a mental picture in your head of what an "average" face would look like, compare that face to the face you're looking at, and note the differences. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes the dude's nose is just too large for his head. Or her ears are so large she could flap them and fly away. Caricaturing isn't always "exaggeration", it's also minimizing features as well as maximizing them. Maybe you're thinking "How can she be such a loudmouth with such a small mouth?" Look at the person and gauge the relative sizes of one facial feature against the other facial feature. The features of the subject should only be compared to their own features. If you have two people in a drawing and the first person has a larger nose than the second person, don't give the first person a large nose if he really doesn't have one in relation to his own face.

Drawing materials

To start to caricature you're going to need a few materials. The nice thing about drawing is that it's a pretty inexpensive hobby. Drawing is simple enough that you could use any writing implement and any drawing surface, but if you're going to take the time to learn, you might as well get some decent tools. Lap desk. Since this site is on the Internet, you'll probably be sitting in front of your computer as you draw, so you're going to have to be comfortable there. If you're at a large desk where you can just clear a spot next to your keyboard, that would be fine. If you're at a smaller desk, or just don't have room to draw on your computer desk, might I suggest a "lap desk". At many art supply stores, and even at some Wal-Marts, you can buy what looks like a large clip board. It's just a large piece of wood with clips bolted on so you can clip your paper to the board. Of course you could just get your own board and tape your paper to it as well. What you will do is set the board in your lap as you sit at your computer desk and lean the top of the board on your desk so you have an angled surface to work on. You may want to angle your body so you can get to your computer's mouse. For paper you can just use typing paper of at least 8.5x11 inches or just grab a stack of printer paper. Get one of those pink school erasers. Hopefully you'll never use it. Also get a few of those cone shaped erasers that go on the end of a pencil. Blender. You can use regular number 2 pencils, but I think the lead is too hard. A hard lead will give you a real thin, gray line, a softer lead gives you fatter, blacker lines. If you're at the art store looking for lap desks, grab a bunch of 5B or 4B pencils. You may want to get a blending tool to help create shadows quickly. It's just tightly rolled up paper. The one you buy will look much whiter than this one, this one is years old. But you don't want the thing to be white when you use it. To effectively blend with it you have to prepare it. Take a blank sheet of paper and rub your 5B pencil lead all over it. Now roll the tip of the blender all over this graphite on the paper. Load the blender with as much graphite as possible. Then when it's "loaded", write with the tip of the blender on a clean sheet of paper and see what kind of line you get.  The blender will "blend" lines, hence the name.

Line drawing

The first caricature you'll draw won't really be a caricature. What I want you to do is "dumb down" a portrait so we can get a caricature style of drawing going. Draw this face with simple lines and shadows. Does your drawing look something like this? Get your lap desk out and put a sheet or two of paper on it and get comfortable in front of your computer. Sharpen your 5B pencil and have your eraser handy. If you'd like to print out the photo we'll be working with go ahead. I want you to draw the woman here with the simplest lines and shadows you can. Draw her in correct proportion, but do it with as few lines as you can. If you need to review how to measure the facial features to get correct proportions check out that section of DRAWING PEOPLE. To draw this woman, take as long as you need and erase any lines or shadows you don't like. Start with her eyes, correctly space the eyes, then draw the nose, then the mouth, then the chin, then enclose the whole thing with the hair. Measure all these features against one another so you keep correct proportion.  The goal here is to learn a style of drawing that would be useful in caricaturing. Draw and shade simply as you can. Does your drawing look anything like the one I did? If not, that's OK, I want you to develop your own caricaturing style anyway. But let me explain the features of my style and how to create them. Bold Line. Unlike portraiture, caricaturing should have an element of "cartoony-ness" to it, and cartoons have simple, bold lines. The lines you draw should really separate one element from another and be fat, dark and confident. Notice the line that is her chin. It's darker and more defined than that area on the photograph. And the lines that make up the nose are bolder than they are in the photograph as well. Thick lines create shadow without all that involved, time consuming, gradient shading stuff. Be confident in your lines and don't timidly sketch them, really mean it when you put a line on the paper and do it with one long and heavy stroke. Detail of her right eye. Shadow. You're going to draw shadows to complement your bold lines, but the shadows shouldn't be overpowering to the line. Look at the way I drew the shadows on the woman. Rather than do heavily gradient shadows, just hint at them. Draw the main shadows that will define the face, but don't draw every shadow. The way your subject is lit in the photograph is going to determine how you do your shadows. That's why I'd rather draw a pretty evenly lit photo, like the one above, than one that has really heavy shadows. Hair. Even the hair will get "dumbed down" in caricature. In portraiture you never draw each individual hair, you draw the shapes and shadows that the hair creates. You do the same thing in caricature, but the shapes and shadows you'd draw would be simpler than they would be in portraiture. In the example above I have about three gradients in the hair: White for highlights, dark for the hair that is visible behind her head, and a middle tone for the rest of it. In straight hair, you'd lay down shadows that go in the direction that the hair falls. I drew straight lines in the direction the hair was going, but I didn't draw each hair, I just hinted at the shadows created by the dark hair. Your assignment: I'd like you to draw some other faces to try and develop a "caricature style" of drawing. Like above, don't try and do a caricature by distorting features, try and draw a face with the correct proportions, but draw it with simple, bold, lines and with minimal shadows. Rather than spending an hour or two doing a highly detailed drawing, try and draw a face in under a half hour. First, sit in front of a mirror with your lap desk and draw yourself. If you'd like to keep going and working on your drawing style, find a photograph online or in a family photo album. The face has to be large enough that you can see all the facial details. My rule of thumb on face size is that the face in the photo can't be smaller than my thumbnail.

Exaggeration

Now let's see if we can caricature this woman.  Let's draw her again. Get your lap desk out and put a sheet or two of paper on it and get comfortable in front of your computer. Sharpen your 5B pencil and have your eraser handy. If you'd like to print out the photo we'll be working with go ahead. We're going to draw our friend here again but this time we'll try and caricature her using your new "caricature style" of drawing. Look at her face. What do you see is the first thing that jumps out about her? It's natural to look at the eyes first when you look at a photo, but is it her eyes that jump out at you? To me, it's her chin and her smile. The roundness of her cheeks make her chin seem smaller than it should be. Her smile jumps out at me because of the "classic" look of it. When I think of a smile, this is the kind of smile I would see. So, my caricature of her would have a minimized chin and a smile that would turn up slightly at the corners more than it actually does. This isn't going to be a really wacky caricature, I'm not going "mess her up", I'm just going to draw her as if she were a cartoon. Fred and Daphne of Scooby-Doo fame don't look "messed up", they just look "cartoony". That's what's going to happen here. We'll mess people up later. I'll have to do more to the face to achieve the effect I'm looking for. I already know that if I minimize the chin and turn the smile up, it will make her nose look longer than it should be. And in relation to her own face, she doesn't have a long nose. So, I'm going to have to shorten her nose to make it look right. I know you may be wondering how I know that I'll have to do all this without drawing it. It's experience. I've drawn A LOT of caricatures. What you may want to do instead of drawing ten thousand caricatures to get the experience, is draw little sketches of possible ways to caricature her. Make several little drawings of different exaggerated facial features and then pick the one you think may look the most like her. Remember, It's not going to be a very good caricature if it doesn't look like her.