Still Drawing a caricature

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You've got the chin drawn. And you drew the dimple in the chin, right? Now we'll draw the sides of the head. Snce her left side is more visible and not covered with so much hair, we'll do that side first.

Get your standard unit by measuring her eye on the photo. Slide the measurement all the way straight over to the corner of her other eye. See that the space between the corner of the eye and the side of her head is just about an eye wide? Measure that out on your drawing and make a mark where the side of the head will be. Now draw a sweeping curve that connects this mark you made with the chin you previously drew. It's best if you draw from the temple area to chin rather than chin to temple, the line you make should be smoother when you draw down. There aren't any hills or valleys you have to worry about when drawing this line, unlike when you drew the chin. If you want to try and draw the right side of her face go ahead, but it will be a bit tougher because of that hair that's covering her temple.

Let's define the forehead. Holding your pencil vertically on the photo, measure from the tear duct of the left eye to approximately the part in her hair. If you turn that measurement 90 degrees and put one end of it at the corner of the left eye, you'll see that it goes about halfway through the right eye. So on the drawing, measure from the corner of the left eye to half of the right eye, turn it 90 degrees up, and from the left tear duct, measure the forehead. Do you think you could draw two lines that would define her hairline? Starting at the forehead mark you made, which is the part in her hair, draw one curved line down and to the right and connect to the side of the head you drew. Now try the other line for the hair. It's a bit curvier, and will come pretty close to the right eye.

If you didn't draw the right side of the face before, can you do it now with the hairline drawn to guide you?

the hairless head

Add hair, eyes, and facial shadows

Now that you have the forehead and the eyes drawn, you can draw in the eyebrows. Draw a contour line that would define the shape of the eyebrows, then fill it in. Keep in mind where the eyebrows start and end in relation to the corner of the eyes and the tear ducts. This will help to get the length of the eyebrows correct.

Now finish up by finding the outside contour of her hair. You don't have to measure for it, just take a good guess. Fill the hair in by shading in like crazy. Shade in the direction of the hair to make it more "hairlike". Also, if you haven't already done it, draw in her pupils into the eye shapes you've drawn. The eyes are very important, so try and make 'em look good. Here, you can just draw black circles and leave a white spot for highlights. also put in any additional shadows you need, like the ones that would define her cheeks.

That's about it! How do you like your caricature of this girl? If you compare my caricature to the original photo, you'll see a likeness, but it's not a portrait. My caricature makes her look a little younger than she looks in the photo. This is because of what proportions were changed for the caricature. Notice that in the drawing her forehead is larger and her jawline is a bit smaller. Children tend to have proportionally larger foreheads and smaller chins than adults, so when you look at my caricature, she looks younger than she really is. This is a neat trick to do when caricaturing women and girls.

Now you should try and draw some caricatures on your own. You can find pictures of people on the web, or use your family photo album again. As with the portrait drawing you did earlier, you should get large pictures where you can clearly see the features on the face.

In the next pages we're going to look at each facial feature more in depth and address some tricks to caricaturing them. And, of course, we'll draw more caricatures.