Even though when looking back at some of my earliest drawings, there is an obvious lean towards monsters and horror creations like FNAF characters and Godzilla, etc. At a certain point I really wanted to draw caricatures. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to learn everything I could about that style of art. I even did a lot of studies from some of my favorite caricatures that my two favorite caricature artists created, Tom Richmond and Damian Dunn. I am not very great when it comes to caricature art though. What I find to be the biggest obstacle with Caricature art, for me, is trying to create a piece of art that retains the likeness of a subject but also exaggerating key features of the model. I am really bad at doing this.
Above are just a few of the caricature art that I have tried during my journey. Because of the struggles I had, I thought maybe I should pivot and try approaching the issue at a different angle. This led me to learn and study portraits instead. Realistic or stylized portraits, it didn’t really matter because I just wanted to improve my ability to render a drawing someone’s head and face while retaining their likeness. I started to study a lot of comic portraits and facial features. I also studied some more traditional portrait artwork like Andrew Loomis.
As you can see from the studies above, I learned to do a fairly decent render of several people but the issue that I was still having was being able to create a caricature that shares a likeness with the subject while also exaggerating different key features. While I am able to render an image of Martin Luther King Jr and it does look like him, I struggle to create a caricature of someone that has exaggerated features but still retains a likeness so other’s will recognize who the caricature is.
This is still something that I am working on today. Thanks for your support.