Learning to draw caricatures
A caricature is not a drawing of the physical appearance of a person. It is a drawing representing a person’s personality.
I have always been interested in drawing portraits since young but was discouraged to do so by my mother. “There is no money in drawing,” she said every time she saw me doodling with my pencil on any paper that happened to be near. “It’s better to spend your time reading your books and be educated,” she added.
Now retired, you can image my delight when I saw this book “Learning to Draw Caricatures” by Alex Hughes, from the library. It has only 63 pages and I finished reading the book within an hour, jotting down all the essential vital points that I needed to know. And, of course I drew, I mean, I copied, while flying through the pages.
The Boss Man or Godfather.
Yasser Arafatt, Arab Leader.
Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of UK.
From the book I learn:
(1) that the width of a face is two-third that of its length;
(2) that the face is five eyes wide;
(3) that the nose occupies the middle fifth of the face;
(4) that the forehead is one-third that of the entire face;
(5) that the space from nostrils to chin is to be divided into three equal spaces for the chin, the lips and the moustache area.
I also learn how to draw facial expressions of laughter, anger, sadness, anxiety and frustration.
A sad face looks down with the mouth turning downwards.
An angry face either looks down or looks straight into us with a crooked mouth.
Happiness is expressed with an upturned face and upturned lips with the eyes usually looking upwards. For emphasis as to the degree of happiness, the mouth is drawn wide open in a loud laughter.
It is strange that I have never thought of classifying shapes of faces before. After reading the book, and then trying to draw some faces of real people I can now confirm that I have come across at least four of the ten types identified - the square, the triangle, the round and the diamond. The rest of the types - the long and thin, the egg, the inverted egg, the flat ovoid, the hexagon and finally the trapezoid are, to me at least, a slight variation on the basic four types and can just be ignored.
i am researching this topic further and have googled ‘caricature’. I find that there are many caricaturists out on the internet providing caricature drawings from photos for a fee of US$15.00 a drawing. More importantly, there are YouTube videos out there teaching us how to be experts in this field.
During my recent tour of Japan, I saw several caricaturists in shopping centres and most of them had clients waiting for sit-in portraits to be drawn.
Well, as one of the popular Chinese sayings handed down from grandmas, goes:
行行有状元
“Every profession has its champions”.