The Chin and Face

Here's the whole image of her that we've been drawing

... and here's the drawing so far

Do you Remember how we're going to caricature the woman to the right?  About the only thing we're going to distort is the size of her mouth. Making her mouth smaller and pushing it up closer to her nose will make her nose look larger and make her chin look longer.

With the facial features pretty well placed, we'll now draw her chin and the sides of her head to enclose her face. After that, we'll tackle the hair and any finishing up we have to do.

Basically, defining the size and shape of the head is done by drawing the chin first, then drawing the contour of one side of the jaw, then the other side of the jaw. Then define the hairline, and in defining the hairline, the forehead becomes the space between the hairline and the eyes. Finding where to draw these contours to define the face is pretty subjective in caricature, if you want to draw a really fat face, you put the contours of the face miles apart. If you want a skinny face, you'd put the facial contours really close to the outside edges of the eyes. Placing the lines is done by measuring where the contours actually fall on your subject using the facial features as marker for your measurements, then moving the facial contours around on your caricature to where you think they look good.

Get your lap desk out and clip your unfinished caricature of the woman on it and get comfortable in front of your computer. Sharpen your 5B pencil and have your eraser handy. If you'd like to print out the photo we'll be working with, go ahead.

Doesn't her chin look long already?

Her left cheek...

And the cheek and jaw on her right

Let's find where the chin will go. On the photo of the woman, with your pencil, measure from the bottom of her nose straight down to the bottom of her chin. If you take that measurement on the photo, and place one end of it horizontally at the outside corner of her left eye. Does that put the other end of the measure right about at the tear duct of her right eye? Yeah, I get that too. So on your drawing, measure from the right tear duct to the outside corner of the left eye. Turn that measure 90 degrees and put it at the bottom of the nose. See where the other end of the measurement falls, and lightly put a mark there. Now draw a curved line that represents the contour of her chin.

Now we'll draw the sides of the head, and do the left side first. On the right side of her left eye, put a dot a bit less than half an eye away from her left eye. This is the edge of her head. Now, all you have to do is draw a curved line that follows the contour of her face from that dot to the chin line you just drew. Follow the contour of her face carefully. What you can do is go pretty much straight down, then when you get parallel with the mouth, start swinging the line in to meet the chin. For the right side the same process will work, let's start the contour line parallel to her right eye, and let's mark it at her hairline, which is much farther away from the eye than the other mark was. I see her hairline is about an eye width from the corner of her right eye. Do you see that? Since we want to make her chin look longer we should make her face narrower than it is. So, find her hairline at about an eye to the left of her right eye, then bring that measurement in a little bit to make her face narrow. Mark that point on your drawing. See in the image to the right where I originally put the mark, then moved it in. The right side contour is a steeper angle than the left side, then it gets really steep about parallel to the mouth. Draw this line pretty lightly because you may have to erase it and take another whack at it. I had to. When you draw the contours of the face, draw from the eye to the chin so you're drawing from top to bottom on your paper. Lines that are drawn down tend to be much smoother than ones that are drawn from bottom to top.