Client asked me to draw Caricature in studio. From this photo.

Jumping in to it. I'm rarely in the Zone as soon as I start. So I drew what I saw. Made mistakes on the first 2 attempts. The 3rd one was good, so I colored it in.

By then, I Knew a lot about this face. So I easily, yay, made the 4th Caricature. New Style! This is what draws a crowd at Events. It's easy to do..... but only when I Can do it.

and just for exercise, for comparison, I forced myself to draw it plainly. Like a fill-in-the-blanks sort of hack. It's so frusrating when it turns out that this is what a fearful person wants. Uninteresting. Dull.

Oh. oh. alright. Then I just drew her as a basic 'pretty girl' face. Safe. loved by self-conscious people who have no confidence. This keeps a Party as dull as the picture is 'safe'. But I do Not like to buy into the trappings of social stigmas. Who ever decided that they only like smiling girls with dainty mouths and barely a hint of a nose? If you honestly Love a person, you would prefer her idiocyncracies. And if you came to the Party to have Fun, you would feel delighted to Play with those idiocyncracies. Exaggerating the uniqueness of the specific girl

There are such subtle nuances that affect what we see. Such subtle nuances that affect a person's mood. Personality. So when we draw Caricatures, the result iS affected by so many choices along the way.

This isn't such a concern when we're drawing Party Caricatures. No time to study a person's whole personality. And no time to try out different lines. It's all just fun. We're all in the Party Zone.

But when making a Studio Caricature.... the choices become more critical. There's time to choose what we want to Caricature to be saying. Personality. We get subtle changes from each line ~ thicker? thinner? softer? harder? angular? curved? exactly where would that curve go?

Several years ago, I felt honored to draw the two Dentists from Preserve Your Teeth. They are quite respected among the Best Dentists around. (If you need dental help, I recommend that you email them to see what can be done: ESinfo@preserveyourteeth.com ).

These two Dentists are married to each other, and they work in the same office. Dr Urbankova, the one with the 'braid' does the general dentistry. Dr Engebretsen, represented here as the 'floating mask in the sky', does periodontics.

Very pleased with their pictures, but only the picture of the Dentist with the braid got framed and hung up. Because they wanted them both to be the Same Size. (I had drawn the picture Dr Urbankova on 8.5 x 11 paper. I had drawn the picture of Dr Engebretsen on 11 x 17 paper. So now they requested that I redraw the picture of the Dr Engebretsen onto 8.5" x 11" paper.

I did that:

Then I was imagining what it would look like in the Dentist Office. Both fine Carictures, but do they Match? When the pictures are hanging together? So I started playing around with making a full-face picture of Dr Engebretsen.

Nice. I gave them Both the new floating mask picture And the picture with the cap. But what I'm writing about in this post is the Subtle Nuances of drawing the Caricature. Here's a picture of what I went through before I settled on that excellent Full Face picture of Dr Engebretsen.

You can notice the subtle changes of things like:

even though I represented his 'Mouth' as a single line, where to bend it? Changes the expression.

and even though I chose 'Short Hair' to be indicated near the 'Baseball Cap', what type of line to use??

and I felt like the heart-shaped 'Adams Apple', although cute, was not a good idea in this case......

Just relaxing. I watched a pleasant movie called 'Milton's Secret'.

Pen moving. I drew the main character. Interesting face

Had a few minutes before going in to the Bat Mitzvah yesterday, so I went back to practicing Tame Caricatures. Each of my approaches feels different than another approach. I finally discovered how to switch easily from Tame Caricatures to Cartoony Caricatures. And I realized that my best choice for Speed and Quality would be to:

Draw Individual Females as Tame Caricatures,

Draw Couples and Groups as Cartoony Caricatures,

and Draw Males as Cartoony

Using very little, if any, predraw (perhaps just size or placement), I approached the Tame Caricatures with Outside-In in my mind even though I frequently drew the Inside before the Outside. And using very little, if any, predraw (perhaps just size or placement), I approached the Cartoony Caricatures however it hit me ~ usually like yes yay also Outside-In.