Hey everybody, welcome this is court jones here and today we're going to be drawing memory
sketches of you, the proko students who submitted your photos some time ago.
Now memory sketching is where we look at the photo for just a brief amount of time, and
try to draw the entire caricature totally from memory without referring back at the
photo.
The purpose of that is, as I said in the main lesson, is to just develop your visual memory
till you have better visual recall.
Because when you draw caricatures, the more you look at the photo, I think the tendency
is to draw more portrait-like.
If you want better exaggerations, you wanna draw more from your memory, or what you think
you remember about the face, things that stood out.
When you do memory sketches and don't rely on the photo as much, you tend to be more
free and experimental in what your doing.
Now I've done a bunch of celebrity memory sketches, and that actually in a sense is
cheating a little bit, because I am familiar with all the celebrities I've drawn.
So I have more that just that 3 second or 15 second memory of their faces in my memory
banks.
So, drawing people who's faces who are relatively unknown to me, like you guys out there in
proko-land, is actually a much truer test of my memory sketching abilities.
And I'll show you more of what you can expect when your drawing from memory I think.
So let's go ahead and get started.
And I want you all just to keep in mind when I'm drawing these, the point of these is not
to get the perfect likeness.
It's not necessarily a technique thats going to give you results that your going to put
up on your wall and put in your portfolio.
This exercise is just about doing the exercise, its just like going to the gym to do the reps,
to lift the weights, its just building muscles.
So most of these sketches are going to be throwaways.
The true value in this exercise is just going through the motions and doing it.
Because while your doing and practicing this, you are improving your visual recall in what
your drawing.
So lets go ahead and let Stan come in and show me the photos and take them away one
by one.
Don't draw yet, just watch.
Ok.
So, memory sketching, it's tough.
It kicks your butt.
Your not gonna get a lot of great sketches out of it just like me, most of my sketches
are, you know, I could probably develop them into more interesting, more accurate caricatures.
But that's not the point of this exercise.
The point of the exercise is to just do the exercise.
Because it helps you develop your visual muscle memory.
The more that you can do that, the more that you rely on your memory and your gut and your
instinct when you are doing caricature work, I think you'll probably notice that the sketches
I did when I was looking at the subject for the least amount of time, were actually my
funnier exaggerations.
They tended to be more bold and more risky and more fun.
Really because I was drawing from what I thought I remembered about the person and what stood
out about their likenesses, being unique or different from the average.
And that's the whole point of this.
So, do these exercises as much as you can, do them as a warm-up before maybe you do your
real work.
But don't get stressed out about it, if you don't get great drawings, thats ok.
Just relax, do the exercise and have fun.
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