Welcome to the student critique video for lesson eight on Caricature Checklists or to-do
list.
The Caricature Checklist is basically another strategy for designing the initial idea or
concept for the exaggeration.
It's an alternative to what we learned in the fundamental part of the course which was
drawing thumbnails.
Instead of drawing a thumbnail, we're gonna actually write a list, a written list, of
all the distinctive things that make your subject look unique.
And that will be our guide in drawing a rough sketch.
It's sort of a time-saving device I came up with in my own workflow to help me when the
thumbnail sketches just weren't cutting it.
Because when you're making the list, it's basically giving you a set of directives that
you have to follow and it's training you to be a better observer and a thinker about what
you're actually seeing and what you wanna do to the caricature to change it, to stretch
proportions.
Now, everyone who submitted, I wanna thank you for all your submissions.
I've seen some really great work.
There's people all along the spectrum from very rudimentary to way more advanced.
And I'm gonna be talking to, you know, to lots of you today about that.
Student Critiques are a huge part of any course, because you can relate usually to what I’m
saying even if your not the student being critiqued.
A lot of people suffer from the same problems and the same setbacks when they’re drawing
and learning something.
This is actually just a preview of what the premium students are going to get.
If your a member of the premium course you get access to all the student critiques.
Today I’m just gonna do one or two.
So with that let’s go ahead and get started on our first subject here.
Now, here is Mathew Manyay.
Mathew Manyay's drawing of...or painting, I should say, digital painting of Michael
Keaton.
My first impression is that a really good likeness.
I can tell immediately who it is and, you know, there are some good things about it,
the choices are generally good.
But the execution is pretty rough.
It's kind of ambitious at this stage of trying to do a digital painting of it.
But, you know, because it does the structure needs a little bit of work and needs to be
figured out a little bit more fully.
And just a general note, not related to drawing but just the painting part of it.
I don't really get into too much painting discussions.
But I will say, I would encourage you to not sample the colors directly from the photograph.
I can tell that's what happened here.
All the colors here are too photographic.
I can see areas that matched the tones perfectly and they don't make a lot of sense in the
painting.
They're kind of jarring when you put them together in a way where you don't blend them
properly or they don't have enough variation.
Because you see there's like of areas of just flat color.
It looks like, so you sampled the area here right above his eyebrow the photo and you
painted that over this entire area right here, sort of a gray ochrey color.
And there's just all these patches of flat color around the nose, the forehead and this
whole area is like one color essentially.
And it's just has this weird mish-mosh, it's a bit spotty.
You're using colors that in tones that are in the photo but without enough, I think,
experience painting perhaps to make them work.
Also, it's a bad habit to get into because you'll often have to work from poorly lit photos
in your professional work.
Or you might have to combine five different people from five different photos into one
illustration.
And then what do you do when all the lighting, the coloring, and the shadows are completely
different from photo to photo?
One might be exposed to like incandescent light and it's all orange and yellow, and
another picture have been taken outdoors, and it's very cool lighting with more shadows.
So if you just rely too much on sampling your colors digitally from the original reference
photo, you're gonna get yourself into trouble.
Because it's not good training and you can see the results.
It will give you sort of spotty end results.
And it has this really clear signature of I sample from a photo, I didn't, you know,
mix the colors on my own.
That's the danger of working digitally, I think, to painting digitally is that you get
too used to these kind of tricks and techniques and you don't really properly learn to see
value and color the way you should and interpret them in your own way.
And your paintings look like they were sampled from photos.
Even if you do it successfully, then you've got just painting that looks too photographic
in its colors.
And that looks jarring too.
So I always enjoy paintings where artists you can tell, use their own color palettes
for a harmonious result.
So just my little rant about that.
Let's go back to the drawing.
Let's take a look at your list and see what you came up with for your checklist.
An oval or balloon-shaped head.
I can see that.
I might say more of like an egg but yeah, balloon also works because I think it's wide
at the top and narrow at the bottom the way a balloon is when it's held on a string.
Severe, almost angry brows or eyebrows.
Okay.
Pursed lips, yeah.
The bulbous bald nose, not particularly large.
I would agree with that.
Awesome widow's peak, makes forehead appear larger.
You can call it a widow's peak.
It's actually just a receding hairline.
But yes, a very distinctive shape for him.
He's always sort of had that receding hairline with just a little bit up top.
Not technically a widow's peak though.
Heavy brow ridge, muscle, yes.
Sort of the brow ridge area, above the eyebrows, is very meaty.
I mean, it might be the bone underneath but it does look like a meaty brow.
Scrunched chin, Yeah.
It's sort of sunken into the face, into the neck a little bit.
And he doesn't have a very strong chin in general as just a male type, a little bit
softer chin than average.
Bumpy skin and jowls.
Yeah, I can see where you're getting that.
Surprised, taken aback look.
Yeah, I mean, if you wanna interpret it that way, I think that's fine.
He looks to me slightly amused maybe in a little bit, you know, like he knows what's
going on.
You know, that's maybe what I would interpret it.
And a distinct Keystone shape.
And that's, I guess that's the Keystone shape between the eyebrows here.
And I totally agree.
That's very distinctive for him, the way his eyebrows come down towards his nose.
So that's a definitely good observations there.
What I would probably just do is maybe a tracing on top of this, an abstraction maybe to show
where the structure might be improved.
Okay.
So let's start with the head shape and do an abstraction tracing to see where the structure
could be improved.
Okay.
So I can see mostly the mouth is just a bit off.
It's a little crooked.
You can usually get away with a crooked mouth though because the mouth is so malleable on
the face that who's to say, you know, from one expression to another the right side of
the mouth is higher than the left.
Not a big deal but in the photo, the mouth and nose and eyes, they're all pretty much
aligned with each other.
I think, yeah, the mouth on the left side might be a little higher.
But I'll probably tone that down a bit in this abstraction.
So let's find the other rhythms.
Let's find the temple rhythm at the side of the forehead.
And the brows.
So I'm actually finding the rhythm of the upper part of the brow where it meets the
forehead.
He has a very thick, heavy brow.
So I think what you've got there is pretty good.
I'm just kind of following the shapes that you have.
And the circular rhythm in the front of the forehead will actually help us make sure those
eyebrows are in the right place and just make sure my circle is oriented around my center
line of the face.
Make sure they're symmetrical.
And I can see this brow over here is a little bit far compared to this one here, which is
actually on that circular line.
So that's an area where it might help improve the alignment of the features.
And then when finding the eyes, I always try to connect them up with one another just like
the other rhythms, like the muzzle rhythm and the nasal labia rhythm.
I go from one side of the face to the other to make sure both sides connect with each
other visually.
And the same goes with the eyes.
He does have some asymmetrical eyes in this angle but I do want them to match up with
one another on the face.
It actually looks like it's pretty good for the upper lids.
But your lower lid I think is a little bit low on the right side of the face there.
Also, the eye on the right.
Looks like it might be out to the right a little bit.
It's a little too far from the nose.
I think I might wanna bring that in.
So here's the eye on the right.
I'm just assuming that's correct, it looks correct to me.
Place that, indication there for the irises.
Yeah.
I think the inside corner of this eye needs to come in just a bit more.
Now, the rhythm front of the septum of the nose down to the chin, that's the triangular
rhythm I like to do.
Since he's pursing his lips, they're coming forward off the front thing of his face a
bit more than what you got.
So I'm gonna actually draw this projecting out in front of the center-line quite a bit
to show that form of those lips as they're pushing outward from the face.
So the position of the mouth is gonna have to change.
It's gonna have come over to the right side a little bit more.
And the chin can still be receding back close to that center line.
I think I'll just pop up just a bit more though now because that metallus muscle sits on the
front of the chin.
And that's what's puckering when that expression is being made.
And here's my abstraction minus the illustration underneath.
It's kind always hard to see a likeness with abstractions.
So I'm gonna do a quick trace over of this, just to give a little bit more finished look
so you can see how this facial structure ends up coming out.
Ok, just dim that down so I can see the obstructional...or, my line lines on top
of the abstraction a little better.
I think I'm gonna bulk up that nose just a little bit for a slightly more caricatured
effect than what we laid down in the abstraction.
All right.
So there we go.
A little bit more, a little better alignment of the features, taking what you had and just
building on that, caricaturing it just a little bit more than what you had and trying to fix
the alignment so it could be developed more into a finished rendering.
So yeah, this...I think my own sketch here could use a little bit more refinement and
development to bring it out just a bit more.
Plus my eyes could be a little smaller in this choice of exaggeration.
But yeah, so I hope that helps you figure out how you might take yours and move to the
next level.
So there’s a quick taste of one of the critiques for the caricature checklist assignment.
Caricature checklists are a fantastic thing to do, no matter what stage of development
you’re in or what exercise your doing.
Caricature checklists help you organize your thought process before you start drawing,
and its immensely valuable.
For any type of illustration work, really, you should always write a list of goals of
what you want to achieve, what you want to communicate, even if its not related directly
to the facial structure.
So, if you’d like to get access to all this great premium content and see the full critique
video, be sure to sign up for the premium course on proko.com/caricature.
And you’ll get a lot more content and I put the instructions in the videos into more
context with narrated example and of course lots more of these student critiques.
But thanks and I hope to see you next time.