Caricature and Drawing
Newsletter for June / July, 2006
This newsletter is reproduced here by courtesy of YouCanDraw.com -
Once and for all getting you drawing faces and caricatures:
June / July 2006
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Your June/July
2006 YouCanDraw.com
Communiqué
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Howdy all,
What makes Dallas
Maverick basketball star Dirk Novitski caricaturable?
That's this issues question :-) ...lets jump right in!
OK! Congratulations
to the Miami Heat -- I've been pulling for you guys for two years now
- and ya did it! BUT, today's caricature is of Dallas Maverick
Dirk Nowitski (No-Vit-ski). This is one gangly 7 foot German
powerhouse of a player (well not quite a Shaquille Oneal) and quite frankly
a very drawable guy. I spotted him a year or so ago but didn't see the
flood of Internet photos until the playoffs this year. Actually, I had
never even looked for pix until the playoffs this year. :-)
Anyway, today's caricature
- if you didn't gather by now - is of Mr. Dirk. He's a national hero in
Germany and after sifting my way through the web pix, seems like a real
fun-loving guy too. Let's get right down to it.
A common mistake
when drawing from photos
Here's a mistake I
made - I'll admit it right off the bat: I tried drawing him from several
pictures all at the same time. Trying to make a composite out of shots
with different lighting directions, intensities, inside, outside shots,
different shading - lots of different pictures is fine if you have the
time to step back every couple of minutes to readdress one
main light direction. Trying to figure it out in your head if you're rushing
is not the best way to do it. (Which is why you very often see caricatures
artists working live with a strong light pointing at the victims...er
subjects...and always from one side, slightly in front, slightly above.)
So what makes him
caricaturable? Here's a list:
Blonde locks.
Yep he's got hair. All over the place. Though this seems new (for him)
in the last couple years, it's become a trademark. On a guy this gangly
and tall, I like to narrow the top of the head and so tighten up the hair
on top as well. Remember when you're drawing hair, it's darkest in these
places: next to the face, next to the head, at the bottom of any locks
- if light is coming from the top, usually on the inside of tight curls,
and in areas where it overlaps underlying curls.
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Notice the curls
and their highlights / shadows: where hair is closest to the head,
it's darkest.
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Also notice the overall
shape of the curls within the overall outline of the hair: shapes within
shapes. See the shapes and edges first. Then worry about the shading /
shadow / highlights.
Bony brow. A
lot of really tall guys get this very bony face - especially bony brows.
In the case of a lot of really tall guys the question comes up
about the presence of Acromegaly: a condition where you just grow
your behind off. Someone once quipped "pro basketball is a sport
where the court is worn out by a bunch of pituitary cases". There's
some truth to that. I don't know if that's Dirks situation or if he's
just naturally huge. The really bony brow, big broad cheek bones all can
be signs of it (along with huge hands, feet and other things). I won't
pretend I'm his doctor.
Deep set eyes.
Check out the deep set eyes. What might set off a strong bony brow more
than deep set eyes? Question: How do you make those deep set eyes?
Answer: By making the darkest shadow and the lightest highlight
contrast each other in very close proximity - with a strip of a middle
tone between them.
Look at the photo
above: the darkest part of the photo is in and around the eyes. The brightest
highlights are on the cheeks -- and on the bony brow over the eyes. See
how that proximity of light and dark (i.e. contrast) makes for really
deep set eyes? Squint to make this clearer. Also notice the middle tone
between these two extremes? The eye brows (the actual hairs of the eyebrows)
make up this transition zone. Painters often use a very similar principle
but with color: put two bright complimentary colors directly adjacent
to each other. Your eye will immediately be pulled to that area. (Complimentary
colors? Orange and blue are compliments, as are red and green or yellow
and purple, etc. - they're colors opposite each other on the color wheel.
But you don't need to know that to draw caricatures :-).
Strong cheek bones.
I'll reuse this picture: See how broad the cheekbones appear? Especially
when the hair obscures most of the forehead? Look at the right side of
the photo on the same side as the microphone hand. Look at the cheekbone
on that side. That's a major arch that cheekbone travels through. (travel...get
it? Sorry. Real bad.)
Long face. Using
the photo above as reference you'd think with those broad cheekbones he'd
have a broad face. But a relatively small mouth (small in relation to
the middle of pupils -- which is the standard for the Mr. Average mouth:
from corner of mouth to corner of mouth as wide as the center
of one pupil to the center of the other. See vertical
landmarks if this isn't clear...I also recommend going to the Archives
page and scrolling the far right hand column and click on the "Vertical
Landmarks" Flash lesson for a really in-depth review.)
The small mouth and
the partial goatee contribute to the overall length of the face too. Now
look at this subtle detail: notice the bottom edges of the cheeks: notice
how long they appear? Drooping to well past the bottom of the nose? (as
if anything could droop on a guy with 4% body fat). And the nose being
on the long thin side only adds to the overall long sense I get when I
look at this face. This is subtle too: look at where the corners of the
jaw seem to tuck under the cheekbones. Being so gracefully hid under /
behind / beside the cheeks I think almost unconsciously makes a face appear
narrower. All that is summed up in this picture:
The maxilla bone (the
bone the upper teeth are anchored in) also looks really narrow in this
photo above (yes it's a small picture but you can see it! Don't know what
a maxilla is? Open your sourcebook, click on the "find" function
and type in "maxilla" or just Google it...or heck, just click
here for a quick maxilla anatomy lesson.)
Big choppers. That's
what you see in this picture. I noticed it during the NBA finals too:
Dirk flashes those teeth in the heat of competition and they become a
real noticeable thing to exaggerate (in my way of thinking anyway).
Chin hair - modified
goatee. In the photo directly above, Dirk's chin hair is kind of in
an intermediate phase. It's become another staple of his look the last
year. (I'm sure any of you Texans will straighten me out on this for sure:
how new / old / temporary the look is :-)
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Here's an older
picture that shows the medium long hair and the growing chin hair.
But you also get the sense of the strong bony brow over the eyes,
the deep set eyes, broad cheekbones and the narrow "apron of
the upper lip".
(The "apron
of the upper lip" is the skin that covers the upper teeth between
the bottom and sides of the nose and spreads out like, well, an
apron on it's way down to transition into the upper lip).
See the teeth
too?
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Well I'm getting close
to identifying all the things that make Mr. Dirk unique and are features
(or features within features) that I think make him caricaturable. One
last thing:
Shoulders that
stretch from here to St. Louis. I've never met Mr. Nowitski but being
7 feet tall and weighing 245 pounds, well, that's just plain a big man
- and still he looks so skinny! (Shaquille Oneal is 2 inches taller and
over a hundred pounds heavier - but Shaq doesn't look tall or gangly or
disproportionate unless someone or something is standing next to him for
comparison / contrast). So if Dirk weighs that much, looks so skinny and
is 7 feet tall, why does he look like if a big wind came up he'd get blown
away? It's those shoulders that are as wide as the Black Pearl's main
mast, shoulders that a jersey hangs on like a main sail, shoulders that
stretch from here to St. Louis! Look at those shoulders in this picture:
Twice as wide as that!
(Shoulders that stretch from here to St. Louis).
OK, I've been going
on and on here. It's time to take a look at this months caricature and
you can see if I've captured at least a few of those things I recognized.
Here's the list one more time:
- Big hair (see the
Annie
DiFranco section for more on hair)
- Relatively narrow
forehead
- big bony eyebrows
- deep set eyes
- narrow maxilla
set between broad and long Cheeks / cheekbones
- noticeable teeth
that really come out in the heat of competition
- chin hair (modified
goatee) at the end of a long jaw
- a roughly diamond
shaped face (in a front view)
- and...shoulders
that stretch from here to St. Louis:
I was going to chronicle
each step but the light was so bad and the setting on the camera was "manual"
- so I didn't realize how dark the pix were getting. I salvaged these
next two steps in Photoshop (using several series of brightness, contrast
and "multiply layers"...for those of you who use Photoshop to
touch-up photos).
The first one shows
the outline of the face, hair, and eye. You can see the cheek forming
up on the left side of the picture and lines that define the upper lip:
And here's a nearly
complete drawing before shadowing, headband and
deeper hair texture were added later:
Well that's all for
now folks. Keep chipping away: make a regular practice of drawing (a minimum
of 15 minutes 4 or 5 days a week will truly get you in the groove!). Have
a great 4th of July weekend (you USA folks), a great Summer elsewhere
in the Northern Hemisphere and a cozy Winter in the Summer Hemisphere!
Warmly,
Jeff
Kasbohm
& Company's
Drawing-Faces-and-Caricatures-Made-Easy.com
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