Hey, Court Jones here, and this is the Student Critique Video for the lesson on Opposition
Caricature Sketching.
If you remember from the main lesson, opposition sketching and caricature is when you draw
two people side by side at the same time and play off the opposing person's characteristics
to help you figure out the exaggeration.
Now this is really particularly helpful when you have one boring face to draw.
You can pair them up with somebody else who maybe is not so boring who has a very different
type from the main subject, it can help you figure out where to exaggerate, how to exaggerate
the boring subject because you'll immediately see the difference.
When you look at two faces side by side, how different someone's nose is from another.
Like if you have a picture of Paul Rudd you need to draw, you need to draw a caricature
of him, pairing him up with someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman really shows the differences
between the two and gives you a stronger caricature for both.
So it can really get you out of a sticky situation when you don't know what to do with someone
and that happens a lot, especially with good looking, average looking celebrities who make
it really hard on a caricature artist.
So, for this free preview of the critique lesson, let's look at one student's work and
see where we can improve upon it.
Okay, now this is Josh Proctor's drawing of actresses Ana de Armas and Mackenzie Davis,
I believe.
And Josh, on this one, I don't think you got past the thumbnail sketch phase.
It's just it's so rough that it looks incomplete and I can't really tell what your decisions
are, if they're a result of conscious effort or just from being fast and loose and messy
with the lines.
And you have some problems with the alignment of the features and the head shapes are just
a little funky and deformed and they look more distorted than they actually look like
caricatures.
Also I think you can really have more fun with the differences between their head shapes.
There are differences that you indicated here.
You gave Ana de Armas a really wide square jaw and Mackenzie Davis really wide cheekbones
and a narrow jaw.
Definitely those are differences and I can work with that.
I think I can redraw these in a way though that might be a little more true to their
likenesses while at the same time playing up the differences even further.
So let me take a crack at it, see what I can do.
When comparing Ana up against Mackenzie, I see Ana's face is really short, round and
wide.
She's still a slim type.
It's just her skull shape is a little bit shorter and wider than Mackenzie's.
And with Mackenzie's face, I think a long tall head will really work well.
She has a strong jaw line but her cheeks are even stronger still so let's see what I can
do with those.
Okay, let's plug some features in here to see if I can get a likeness to emerge from
these two lovely ladies.
My first decisions here are regarding their eyes and nose.
I see Ana's eyes as widely spaced and Mackenzie's more closer together and her eyes are I guess
taller, bigger from top to bottom whereas Ana's are a little bit wider.
And I think Mackenzie has a larger, more bulbous nose.
On the left Ana's nose is a little shorter, more girlish I guess you might say, but they
both have sort of thick eyebrows.
Both women have big full lips, but they're full in different ways.
Ana's on the left has more of a...well, she's showing her teeth.
Sort of a buck tooth look and McKenzie's mouth is closed.
Both have sort of neutral expressions.
But when they have features that are similar like that really dig in deeper, observe both
side by side and really ask yourself how do they differ?
How can I make the differences more obvious between these two?
So Josh, I hope my sketches here were helpful to you.
I'd like to see you put a little bit more time into the sketches you do if only just
to see your thoughts more fully resolved and realized because I couldn't quite tell what
some of your intentions were with the shapes that you'd drawn because they were just so
rough and scratchy.
Try to draw a little bit more completely and think a little bit more about your structure,
lining up the features using the crosshairs, using the abstraction even if you need to.
Be more specific in your choices and try to play up the differences between the two people
even more when you're doing this type of assignment where you're caricaturing one person off of
the other.
It is a great technique, not only for drawing two people together if you have, say, to do
that for a job or for a commission you have, but if you have just one person to draw, go
ahead and throw another person next to them in your sketchbook to help you figure out
how to best exaggerate that person.
And try to make sure it's a real different physical type.
Some of the problems people were having I think came from pairing up two people for
this technique that were too similar, either in head shape or their general body type.
And it's possible, you definitely can do that if you want, it just makes it harder on yourself.
In the beginning, when you're learning, just try to pair up two completely different body
types, two types of people, and it'll make those differences even more obvious when you're
sketching and you can maybe get a crazier caricature than you would otherwise.
That's just a taste of what you get in the premium course.
If you sign up for the premium caricature course, you get access to the full length
critique video where I go over lots of different people's assignments and of course you get
longer versions of the main videos and lots of bonus videos where I demonstrate the techniques
on lots of different celebrity types.
So you get a lot of benefit out of becoming a premium student of the caricature course.
But keep on submitting your work for critiques in future videos.
Keep on watching, keep on drawing, and I'll see you next time!