Hello, and welcome to critiques for lesson five on drawing the final caricature sketch
or the final rendering.
There's actually gonna be three major components I'm going to critique.
One is the overall structure, the alignment, the perspective, the anatomy, and how that
looks, and how that fits into the overall piece.
The second major thing I'll be helping with, I think, will be the exaggeration choices,
or if the exaggeration or likeness could be improved, I'll make some corrections on certain
areas of people's drawings.
And then third, possibly, I'll get into some style issues where maybe the style of the
drawing could be improved or the rendering could be done in a slightly different way.
I might offer some suggestions.
But that's not as important to me as the structure and the exaggeration and likeness because
that's really the thing I wanna emphasize most in this course as being important at
this fundamental level.
Style and the rendering, you know, that will come later the more that you practice fundamentals.
This is Mick Nelson's drawing of Tommy Lee Jones, and it's one of those sketches where,
again, I could see where it was going.
I could tell who it's supposed to be, but it didn't quite hit the mark.
And I'm not sure what happened between your rough sketch and abstraction in the final
drawing because the abstraction looks pretty solid.
I really like the shapes that you've created here.
The forehead looks good and how it relates to the rest of the face.
Everything looks even and the abstraction is well done, but I don't think you ended
up following the abstraction on your final drawing for some reason, like that forehead
looks like it came out too far.
The forehead looks like it just popped out too far.
Everything looks like it's sort of, you know, skewed a little bit to the upper right.
And I don't know, the angles and everything are just not quite lining up.
It's something about it is just a little skewed and a little off.
It's hard to tell exactly what it is until I would get in there and maybe do a tracing
of it.
And I could spend time on that, but I think what might be more help for you to hear is
actually some of the specific decisions about the shapes you created around the nose and
the eyes specifically that...they just kinda got away from you.
They don't look structurally sound.
You kind of missed the likeness, especially in the eyes.
I think what's hurting the eye likeness is you've drawn them too large on the head.
Older men especially, more than any other type, are going to have much smaller eyes
in relation to everything else on their face compared to the average.
You've given him the eyes of sort of like a 16-year-old girl.
They're very big and doe-eyed.
His eyes are just a lot more small on his face.
Even though he's not squinting, the flesh sags makes the eye-opening a little bit smaller
when you get older.
His head shape and the fat on the face makes the face larger and broader in comparison
to the eyes themselves.
So I'll show you how I might redraw the eyes in this particular situation.
All right, so I'm drawing in a layer right above a dimmed-down version of this drawing.
And I think I will draw just a quick abstraction, couple of rhythms here to connect the eyes
up to one another, but I'll make the abstraction a little smaller, yeah, pretty eye openings
here.
And then I'm gonna have a center line.
Everything's gotta be orientated around a center line, otherwise, things like this happen
with the forehead.
It goes off into its own direction.
It doesn't seem like it fits the rest of the face.
I would redraw that forehead.
It would be something more like akin to that.
Okay.
Let's find the rhythm for the lower bags of the eyes.
Looks like the lower bags of the eyes gave you a little bit of difficulty as well.
He has very, very unusual eye bags.
It's like the creases are there for the bags below the eyes, but there's no flesh inside
them.
It's like they've been deflated or something.
Perhaps he has had some work done and took the, you know, fat out from underneath the
eyes.
It looks a little weird, but that's something that's very distinctive about him that we're
gonna try to capture in this sketch.
The nose, too, I can see kind of why you made that choice to make this really extreme deep
in the nose, but it's really not working.
It feels like the bridge of the nose is completely out of line with the rest of the face.
So we're starting with the bridge of the nose here.
We're gonna draw that at a more correct angle, and then the ball of the nose can come out
further.
But I think what you had done where you drew the bridge of the nose angling down into the
left, it was just a bit too much distortion.
I like the choice of photos, though.
Some people are choosing photos for these assignments that are not ideal, with kind
of really bad lighting, like lighting done with a flash.
And this is a good studio photo that shows really decent shadow edges and nice halftones
so there's a lot to work with here, so good choice on the photo.
Okay.
So I've got a bit of a sketch/abstractions we're forming here.
So let's take a look what it looks like without the rough sketch underneath.
Okay.
And I might actually just continue the rest of the drawing without your sketch underneath.
I got into the neighborhood and I have your overall head shape in there and the big decisions
that you did make.
Now, let's make the smaller decisions and figure out how to make it look more like him.
So the shadow's patterns are a little soft.
I'm gonna try to find edges for those shadow patterns.
And where there's a hard edge, I'm gonna make it harder.
When there's a soft edge, I'll try to make it a little softer.
I'm just taking some artistic license with that.
Sometimes, you have to change the reference photo or the model that you see in front of
you just a bit to make it a little bit more stronger of a sketch.
The main thing that you need to be concerned yourself with is how the drawing turns out.
You don't have to be totally a slave to the photo and all the shapes that you see there.
I can see that you weren't actually.
Your shading's relatively simple and almost a little cartoon-like.
I do like the texture that you have on your finished drawing.
It's kind of a fun effect, but the painting feels or the rendering feels very unresolved
and sort of half-finished and not really...you didn't really sort of commit to the darks
and commit to the halftone.
And for a finished drawing, if you wanna call it a finished drawing, you have to, by definition,
commit to the shapes you make and fully resolve them.
So I squint down a lot at your reference photo to see what shapes meld together and if they
meld together and sort of the edges between one dark shape and another sort of disappeared,
that's a good place where you can blend the edge or make a softer edge or lost edge even
and not really make any distinction.
Like the area of the inside corner of the eye here is one such area where there's just
not much information.
And when I squint down, like, I don't see anything, and that's kind of a nice effect,
I think, in the drawing.
You don't wanna have always as much detail in your drawing as there is in the photo.
And again, that's not a problem you have in your finished drawing.
It's not overly detailed, of course.
But I don't want you to get the impression that by...you know, a lot of this advice and
this showing you how I have more attention to detail, I don't want you to think that
I always try to be a slave to everything I see and try to produce every wrinkle on every
halftone that's in the photo because that will just take you a long time.
And, you know, unless you wanna be a photo-realistic or hyper-realistic painter, you really don't
wanna be doing that.
You just wanna edit and simplify the drawing to where the drawing just looks cool, you
know.
There's just the cool factor.
It's sometimes hard to describe, but I think it's personally good shape design, good edge
control, and good values will get that cool finished drawing look.
So there's actually not a really strong edge here.
It's more just a change in the halftone.
And that's the thing, too.
If you wanna get away from that cartoony look where you have strong outlines around everything,
you can't be building your shapes with outlines.
There's gonna be a line initially in there, a very light line, and then you can shade
right up to it and make that line disappear, and then you'll have a more realistic look
to your drawings.
As you get more advanced, you're gonna wanna get away from the outlines, I think.
It's just a personal style.
I mean, some people make a great career out of doing work with strong outlines, and that's
fine, you know.
Like I said, it's all just personal style.
But I'm here to show you kind of how I like to do things, and I like to try to get away
from the cartoony look when I'm doing illustrations and paintings, and those are all about values
and edges.
That's how you tell the story.
It's not with the lines themselves.
So let's get to kind of that cool look.
It's looking a little bit more finished.
It has kind of a fun design to it and with a dark in his eyebrow.
Pay attention to how the hair grows on these eyebrows.
There's like sort of contrasting patterns where the hair will be going in one direction,
and I'll will switch to a different one usually at the peak of the eyebrows when the opposing
hair strokes come into play.
Now, let's move over to this other eye here, and this eye is in a bit more shadow.
It's a little more undefined and hard-to-pick-out detail.
Now, if that's the case, don't try to force more details in there.
Don't try to lighten it up.
Just draw what you see and maybe figure out which eye you want to have more attention
drawn to.
In portraiture, generally, you wanna pick a dominant eye.
That's something a lot of portrait artists, a term they throw around a lot is an eye that's
a little bit more focused.
It's a little bit more rendered and resolved.
Maybe it's more contrasty.
And for us, I think it's this eye here on the left is gonna be our center of interest,
whereas the eye on the right, it's gonna be more in shadow.
It's gonna fall back into shadow a little bit so we're not going to be spending much
time rendering that one.
I'm not putting these interesting brushstrokes in it either.
Let's draw the borders of the eye bag here.
So very lightly, I'll draw on the outlines of the eyes, figure out where the change in
planes are from the lower lid here.
The lower lid is a distinct shape on most people from the bag under the eyes.
The bag under the eyes is not the lower lid and so there'll be slightly different values
on them because of the way the light is hitting from above, casting
a shadow.
Okay.
I'm just gonna glaze that whole area with an overall value, maybe a couple of different
passes of value just to sort of get a tone in there, but keep it simple and not overthinking
it.
So everything in there, there's not gonna be anything brighter than, let's say, this
value.
So it's not gonna compete as much with the eye on the left.
There's gonna be some darker shapes, that's for sure, but nothing too bright on that side
because maybe, maybe the highlights in the eyeballs themselves.
These eyes are really close together under the eyebrow, almost no distinction between
the eyebrow and the skin under the eyebrow.
However, the bags under the eyes have a little bit more creases to them, a little more texture.
I don't wanna draw too much attention to them, but I put in a little bit more in there to
capture the character of those fleshy bags.
That far plane, side plane of the nose is in a bit of shadow there so it's gonna be
a bit darker.
There's so many interesting little things and texture bits going on in there.
It's hard to know how to simplify them sometimes so I'll just kind of just take a guess on
how I might wanna solve that, maybe with a few crisscross lines, to show those little
individual pockets of tiny bits of texture.
I try to know what they are.
I guess it's just sort of wrinkled flesh.
Okay, let's grab a little bit of a white for the highlights here.
The highlights themselves aren't very bright.
It's tempting sometimes to draw really bright highlights in the eyes to get that twinkle,
but it's not appropriate for every lighting situation.
Okay.
So there's a lot more around the eye here, some surrounding areas and interesting details
I could get involved with, but I don't wanna spend too much time on this.
I just wanna give you a sense of how I might go about doing a more interesting finished
look to this caricature.
There are definitely some corrections in the structure you can make, as I mentioned earlier,
with the...you got away from the abstraction a little bit in this final drawing.
But to take your drawings to the next level, you gotta just slow down and focus on areas
in the drawing, the final drawing stages where you could do that.
You don't have to think so much anymore about working from big to small, from the general
to the specific.
Now, you could really hone in on an area, finish it and move on to another area.
But don't lose sight of the big picture, meaning, think of an area that you want to have more
rendering, more finish to, a more of a center of interest, maybe give it a little more attention
and loving care to that area.
And the other areas can be rendered nicely, but maybe not quite as much detail or as attention
to detail in those areas.
Alright so I hope you enjoyed this tasting the sample of the critiques that the premium
students get.
There's a lot more in the premium section where I look a lot of peoples different finished
drawings and they all have different problems that they're struggling with.
And nobodies problems are exactly the same, so one of the benefits of premium membership
is you get access to all these extra reviews of student works that might help you on your
own because you'll find something that you're struggling with that another student is facing
that I might be addressing.
So go to proko.com/caricature and signup for the premium course and get access to lots
of great content to really help improve your caricature drawings.