Hey, everybody, Court Jones here.
And I wanna thank all of you for following along this entire time and going through the
course doing all the work.
I hope you found some value in it.
Now I know the course in places got a little technical and all the stuff about breaking
down the drawing into several steps might have seemed a little like overkill.
But the fundamental part of the course is probably the most important.
It's the foundation on which everything you do afterwards is gonna be built.
The stronger fundamentals you have, the better you're gonna be later on in your career as
an artist, doing caricatures.
The second part of the course has a lot of value as well.
I mean, it has interesting techniques and strategies for doing more advanced types of
exaggerations or ways of figuring things out when you get stuck with a roadblock.
But the fundamental course, part one, I think is really where it's at, and really what you
need to focus on if you want to develop yourself as a caricaturist.
Out of all the videos though, in the second part of the course, I think probably the most
valuable exercise would have been the making caricature lists, because that one is really
about setting your intention and organizing your thoughts, figuring out what you wanna
do with the caricature.
That more than any other is probably the most helpful and the most logical way to help overcome
any difficulties you're having in a caricature.
Sit down, write a list, think about what you want to do before you actually do it.
That way when you're drawing, you'll already have those directives or those guideposts to hit.
So I hope it made sense how and why I broke down the course the way I did.
I just think it's the most logical way to develop from a very beginning artist who doesn't
know anything about caricature, to the levels of a master, hopefully.
Now, just watching the videos over and over again isn't really gonna do much for you.
It's kind of like, if you had an exercise video at home and watched it over and over,
without actually getting up to do the exercises.
After you know the exercises and how to work out, then you actually have to go to the gym
and lift the weights over and over.
It's that repetition and the long duration over time, which is going to make you stronger
and better. So it's the same concept.
Caricaturing is really just the art of being able to make good, clear, strong decisions
about how to change your subject space to make it more exaggerated, to improve the likeness.
Just knowing the exercises, how to do them, just watching me do them isn't enough.
It's only through the application and repetition of these exercises by your own hand and with
your own brain, that you actually develop the skills to make good decisions on your
own about the human face.
Drawing funny caricatures is actually more about your mental attitude and your state
of mind and your willingness to take risks, than it is about any kind of skill set or
how you hold your pencil or how you shade.
In short, you just can't worry about how other people are going to perceive or react to your sketch.
Whether you're doing a commission for a private client or a political caricature for a magazine
or drawing someone live on the spot, you can't worry about how they're going to react if
you're going to make them feel bad about themselves, or the person that you're drawing or they're
gonna hate you for doing it.
That kinda stuff is the biggest mental roadblock to exaggeration.
You need to throw all that aside and not worry about what people are going to say about it
or what they're gonna think of you for doing it.
The only person you should please when you're doing these characters is yourself.
And if you have good taste, if you have good skills, and a good eye, drawings that please
you as the artist will generally please most people.
You should strive for excellence in your art and in your caricatures, but don't worry about
trying to achieve perfection.
I mean, there's really no such thing as perfect anyway.
And it's just an impossible standard.
And even if you did achieve a perfect drawing or it's perfectly rendered and shaded and
painted, there's no artistry in that really.
There's no artistry and perfection.
It's the imperfections, it's the subtle nuance of the way you handle a paintbrush, or the
way you draw a line that makes it interesting.
That's what people respond to when they have their favorite artists they like to watch
and follow.
They're responding to how that artist interprets things and makes decisions.
If everybody drew perfectly, everybody would be drawing and painting the same way.
So you're gonna develop more of a personal voice, an audience, a client base if you allow
your own imperfections to come through.
You know, I love John Singer Sargent.
But I don't love him because his artwork was perfect, you know, I love the way he handled
his highlights, you know.
But they're sometimes just swishes of color if you look up real close.
There's nothing perfect about them.
They're drawn extremely well and they're placed correctly and they're a good value.
They have all the foundation principles in place, they're very sound.
But how he actually handles and executes it is very unique to his own personal style,
the shakiness of his hand or the bristles on his paintbrush.
So it's that kind of thing that will draw people to your art.
It's what makes us all unique and you should strive for uniqueness, not perfection.
So to keep engaged and keep yourself motivated in caricature, it's helpful to have a group
to play with, to respond to, and whose work you can respond to.
It's great on social media, there's competitions that you can join every week on social media,
like on Facebook, where you have a subject that you have to draw on and everybody tries
to draw the same subject.
And there's a certain sense of community in that.
You get to know other artists, see what they're doing and how they're handling the same problems.
You can learn a lot from other people, just by being in that group.
You should surround yourself with the type of people that you want to be like, and if
you can't do that in real life, at least you can do it online.
But there are groups like the International Society of Caricature Artists.
I've been a member of them for like, I don't know, 18 years and I go to their annual conventions.
And it's one of the best things I've done for myself personally.
It's a community of like-minded caricature artist who get together once a year, and we have
competitions and seminars and learn from each other, and it's just good times.
The next one's actually coming up later this year, in 2018 in San Diego in November.
So if anyone's interested.
I'll be there, probably giving a talk, so might be a good chance to meet some other fellow artists.
So if you wanna make your living purely as a caricature artist, there are a few avenues
you can follow.
Now, I started as a live quick-sketch artist in theme parks, now I just do private events
where I draw at parties and trade shows and that sort of thing.
And the pay for that can be really good.
You can make a living off that.
But I also do illustration work and commissioned work on the side.
I'll do a painting for someone who wants a caricature just as a gift for someone who's
retiring or their spouse.
So I would actually recommend starting in the field where you can actually work with
other artists like a theme park.
And if you're young, it's a pretty good job to have.
You're actually getting paid to draw and you get thrown in like on day one, just right
into the fire, no pencils, no erasing allowed.
And you have to get good fast and it's stressful and I personally hated it the first few months
I was doing live caricatures in a theme park.
But I'm glad I stuck with it because it's developed into so many other things for me.
But as a freelance caricature artist working out of my studio, there's a lot of options.
I've done stuff for magazines like editorial illustrations, or someone has a book idea
that they want a caricature cover for.
Or I've designed Halloween masks with sort of celebrities as Halloween masks.
I've done character design for animation on a freelance basis a few times.
Packaging illustration, every now and then somebody wants a caricature or a caricatured
version of something like a dog on their bag of dog food.
It's been done.
So there's just so many options out there for a caricature artist.
It's really kind of endless.
And when you have the skills to caricature something, you can apply it to more traditional
type illustrations and portraiture.
I always say that all art is form of caricature.
Even like John Singer Sargent who did these beautiful portraits would, you know, make
the neck a little longer, the person thinner, the eyes larger, to be more flattering.
And that's a type of caricature where you're changing something about your subject, whether
conscious or not to have a certain effect.
It doesn't always have to be funny.
You can caricature the human figure to be more muscular to look like the Incredible Hulk
for comic books. That's just a form of caricature.
So caricature is really everywhere.
There's hardly anyone who doesn't caricature to some degree in their artwork.
So caricature, in one form or another is all around us, and there's no getting away from it.
So if you have those skills to manipulate the face and the human body in a way that
other people can't, you'll have an edge on your competition.
And in art it's just generally good to be flexible.
You don't wanna only be able to do one type of art because you may find the caricature
aspect might be more successful for you financially later on down the road.
You just never know going into it what your life will end up turning out to be.
I know I've been able to travel around the world doing caricature conferences where people
fly me out there.
I met some of my best friends through caricature.
I met my wife at the Annual Caricature Artist Convention.
So it's definitely encompassed my entire life and I don't regret a minute of it.
But figuring out if you want to be a live retail or a quick sketch caricature artist
versus an illustration caricature artist, it's kind of a matter of temperament.
I mean, you can do both. I do both.
But I always looked at the place of live, quick sketch caricature is sort of synonymous
with Improv sketch comedy up on the stage.
We have some actors and you give them a situation and they make this really funny scene out
of suggestions you make.
They're working with what they have in the moment, there's no do-overs, it's all live,
there's no erasers.
That's kind of like what live quick sketch is like.
You're trying to entertain and make people laugh in a few minutes based on the information
you have in front of you. You have to adapt to the situation
and read the person across from you to figure out how
much exaggeration you can get away with comfortably.
Whereas character illustration and fine art caricature painting, that's more like making
a movie then it is like Improv sketch comedy, where you're making a feature film or you
can cast all the characters, set up the lighting the way you want.
Do your research with the reference photos, spend as much time as you want painting it,
and refining it, and editing it until it's exactly the piece of art that you want it to be.
So if you know yourself and you know what kind of temperament you have, you could figure
out what you wanna go into.
If you wanna try to do both, that's great.
I suggest everyone start with quick sketch caricature because it really does put your
feet to the fire and you learn the principles of caricature and how to apply them in real-world
situations fast.
Just like some of the best actors I like started out as comedians or Improv sketch
comedians, comedy is a lot harder than drama.
So I wouldn't necessarily say that caricature is harder than traditional art and portrait
work, it's just a different set of skills.
But I think I like doing both and I think you will too.
Now at the end of this course if you're not the caricature artist you want to be, don't worry.
You're not meant to make all these leaps and bounds so quickly.
It'll take years, it's taken me years to get where I'm going.
And I'm still not there yet.
I'm still developing and learning, hopefully.
But it's just with the constant repetition and the practice of these exercises, and just
drawing faces over and over again, and being brave and bold, where you're gonna actually
improve and you'll notice it after a while, where you look back and you'll see the progress
that you've made and wonder how those sketches that you did 10 years ago were done by you,
because they were so bad and you didn't see it at the time.
Your eye will improve and your hand will improve.
You just have to have faith.
I hate to say this part, but it never gets any easier.
You still have problems that you try to overcome in your caricature or in any kind of drawing.
But you trade in your old problems for new ones.
So, at a certain point, you won't have trouble with the fundamentals anymore, you'll have
mastered those.
But your new problems will be more about the subtleties, about how to design the shapes
in a beautiful and interesting way or how to control your values or your quality of
your paint strokes.
You know, I look at paintings I've done even just a year ago and while they're much
better than what I did when I started doing this, I still don't like them because in that
time, I've grown a little bit more and I just see problems that I didn't notice at the time,
like, "Oh, it's too stiff, or it's maybe too sloppy and I need to improve upon that."
The improving and the changing and the learning never stops.
I guess that's the exciting thing about it because it's never gonna get boring, there's
no upper limit to how you develop as an artist.
You all start in the same place at level zero, but you keep on going and where you go and
how far you go is totally up to you.
Okay, time for some shameless, self-promotion.
Since I'm all done with my Proko caricature coursework, I'll have more time to do my own stuff.
So be sure to follow my Court Jones YouTube channel.
And follow me on Instagram @courtjonesartist
It's my last day of filming here at the Proko studio and Stan is out of town, so I thought
I'd take this opportunity to do something that's been bugging me for a while.
So we have this skeleton here in this office, it's been here forever.
We got seal team Rick on here right now but, you know, I just always thought it was a crime
that we didn't have a real Skelly.
So what I bought just for Stan here a little present, I got little eyeballs.
I'm gonna put in skelly to watch over the group.
Okay.
Oh, yeah.
So we wanna really what makes sure Stan sees this when he comes back.
I guess we'll just put right here in his office when he opens the door.