This series of “How to Draw Caricatures” tutorials are a just a small taste of a larger and much more in-depth book I wrote called The Mad Art of Caricature! The book is 175 full-color pages, lavishly illustrated and contains greatly expanded explanations of the concepts presented in these tutorials, as well and a great deal of additional material on caricaturing other facial features, posture, hands, expression and more, techniques on drawing from live models, doing caricature for freeplace illustration and for MAD Magazine. This is a must have book for anyone interested in caricature, cartooning or humorous illustration. You can order it online here.

Part One: Basic Theory and the Five Shapes

This is the first of a series of articles I will post here on The MAD Blog about my theories, methods and processes concerning how to draw caricatures.A lot of this information is part of what I teach my theme park artists, so it is derived partly from the approach of doing live, quick-draw caricatures. However all of that can be applied to more studio orientated caricature work and I have also added points and concepts directly from the less time-constrained world of caricature illustration. Therefore this is not instruction for just the live caricaturist but for any artist interested in caricature for any purpose.

These kinds of things always start out with a definition, but “caricature” is a hard thing to pigeonhole into a single sentence. How can you, when the word encompasses the elegant, minimalist lines of Al Hirschfeld to the lavish, value and color soaked paintings of Sebastian Kruger to the graphic, geometrical collages of David Cowles and everything in between? Despite the wild differences in style and technique, “caricature” is the tag that is placed on any of these works of art without hesitation. Obviously there is a connection beyond a common technique, school or format. So, what are the universal elements all caricatures have that identify them as caricatures? I would say there are three essential elements that transcend style and medium and must be present in a caricature:

• Likeness- If you can’t tell who it is supposed to be, then it is not successful. All good caricatures incorporate a good likeness of their subjects.
• Exaggeration- Without some form of exaggeration, or a departure from the exact representation of the subject’s features, all you have is a portrait. The level of exaggeration can vary wildly, but there must be some departure. A straight portrait is not a caricature.
• Statement- I believe a caricature must editorialize in some way. The artist must be trying to say something about the subject. It might be something to do with the situation the subject is drawn in, it may just be a play on their personality through expression or body language, it might be a simple as making visual fun of some aspect of their persona or image. Exaggeration itself can accomplish this in some cases. The best caricatures say something more about the subject than that they have a big nose.

By my ‘definition’, a successful caricature therefore looks like the subject, is exaggerated to varying degrees and also has something to say about the subject… some sort of editorial comment. In “live” caricature at a theme park, that third item is often turned way down or ignored completely, but in the case of caricatures for illustration, it’s an important part. (more…)

Rendering with Washes

Now begins the real painting. We’ll start out with the fleshtones. It’s a simple matter to mask off the flesh areas, as they are all defined by the base color we applied.

Before we proceed, I’ve uploaded my basic Photoshop color swatch palette for those interested to download. It’s not very well organized, as I add colors to it as I work on pieces that I might need to use a lot and then never erase them, so everything is all over the place, but here it is.

Click for the palette file

Mac users just click the palette image and choose where to download it to. Windows users right click it and choose “save target as” and the location. Place it in your “presets” folder in the Photoshop application folder of your hard drive, and then you can load it as you wish in Photoshop.

First making sure I am on the “Figure” layer, I select the Magic Wand Tool and click within the flesh areas to select them. You can click each individual area while holding down the shift key , but it’s easier to go to the Photoshop menu bar (when the Magic Wand tool is active) and uncheck the “Contiguous” checkbox. Now one click of the base fleshtone will select all the base fleshtones in the image. (more…)

Applying the Base Color

When coloring I start by applying a base color for each area of the illustration. The color is a mid value, which will allow me to work both darker and lighter to achieve a range of values. Since I am not working on a layer with lines to contain the colors, I cannot use the Fill tool, but have to apply the color ‘by hand’ using my tablet and pen. Actually I use a Cintiq tablet from Wacom, which is a combination pressure sensitive tablet and display, where you draw and paint right on the screen using the special stylus/pen. I reviewed the Cintiq here, and it’s a terrific tool, but a regular Wacom tablet will do fine.

The base color has no opacity variances, but is a solid color. This makes it easy to select with the Magic Wand tool, so I can mask off any area I am painting with just a click. Like I mentioned, I keep the values of these base colors at about the mid range of the value of the object or area it describes. That way I can paint in one direction or the other, value wise, to render the area and create some depth and interest.

My first step will be to create a layer for each different group of areas I am going to color. I used to just apply all the color on the background layer, but lately I’ve learned the value of working on different layers. It’s much easier to make corrections that way. I still keep it simple, because it’s too easy to get mixed up on which layer you are painting on and cause problems. Usually I think in terms of depth of field with respect to the objects in the illustration when determining my layers… one layer for foreground objects, one for mid-ground, etc. For this simple piece, in order of topmost to bottom-most, I will create a layer for the taboret, one for the figure, and one for the table and chair. I’ll use the background layer for the floor shadow and color elements I’ll put behind everything. The topmost layer is the linework “Inks”, but later we’ll add some highlight layers on top of that. (more…)

We begin with a piece of inked line art that we intend to color. I’m using this self caricature done for promotional purposes. It’s a simple, uncomplicated image and there is literally no background, so it will be ideal for this demonstration of the digital line art color technique I use for MAD and other clients. If you are wondering about the inking process, check out my inking tutorial from a few months ago about how to arrive at a clean, inked piece of line art.

BTW, I am using Photoshop CS2 on a Mac Pro running OS X. This all works just fine in Photoshop on the PC, and I’ve indicated PC shortcuts in parentheses. I approached this tutorial with the assumption that some readers will be unfamiliar with even the basic Photoshop elements, so I include the simplest of concepts and steps quite often. My apologies to the Photoshop pros who have to gloss over these parts. (more…)

Continuing with our inking tutorial, we are still concentrating on the central figure on the illustration. After switching to the pen I have started adding more details and lines to the drawing. The pen is great for building up forms, wrinkles and starting to add some values to the figure. I will go back and forth between a brush and pen for a while, but evenually it will be almost all pen work.

There are plenty of things to think about with inking, like form, light, shadow, contrast, etc. It can seem very complex and there is certainly too much to go over here, but in keeping it simple there are a few important and common elements that an inker must consider and use in most inked illustrations. We’ll go over these as they pertain to the main figure, and then expand into the background. (more…)

When I first got serious about cartooning for a career, one of the things I was most concerned about was inking. That seemed to me like a skill and art that would take a really long time to master, and worse yet there seemed to be no good sources of learning the art of inking out there. I found one book I still heartily recommend, called The Art of Comic Book Inking by Gary Martin, which is to date the best book on the subject. There used to be a great website on inking with input from many great inkers but I think it’s defunct. Anyway, long story short I had a lot of trouble finding any sources of learning how to ink.

Inking is scary because it seems so permanent. Pro-white or some other form of white paint can correct mistakes, but the pure black nature of ink is intimidating. I would often feel I ruined the quality of the drawings I had done in pencil, or at least diluted any energy or pop they had with my tentative and unconfident inks. I tried looking at the masters of cartoon inking to learn how they did what they did… artists like Wally Wood, Jack Davis, Will Eisner, Milton Caniff, Hal Foster, Mort Drucker… the list is long but what I discovered was that each of them used an approach that was basically an extension of their drawing style, and emulating their techniques just made my drawings look like Drucker or Wood drawings (okay, BAD Drucker or Wood drawings). It was plain to me that, while I could learn about things like using ink to create volume and form from studying other artist’s work, it would be just plain old practice and trial and error to learn how to ink with confidence and effectiveness.

Unfortunately I was too impatient to just practice my way to getting good with the ink, so I pestered other artists I knew into telling me tips, giving me advice and some instruction in the art of inking. Most of what they told me was to practice, but I did pick up a number of useful mechanical tips, tricks and techniques and was allowed to watch over a shoulder or two and see some masters at work. I also have discovered a number of things on my own, as the years and the pages slowly piled up. I have put together a little tutorial on inking that I will share with you here. Just by way of a disclaimer, I consider myself a “passable” inker at this point in my career. I don’t expect to ever win any awards for my inks, or to ever be confused with true masters like Wood and Eisner, but I no longer approach the pen and ink with fear and loathing, and even occasionally find myself at a point in a job when all cylinders are firing and I am actually having fun with the ink… that is until I catch the pen point on the paper and I skrrriiitcccch a big splatter all over the page. Then the cursing begins…. (more…)

I was hoping to put together a step by step tutorial of my digital coloring technique for MAD while working on this “Hell’s Kitchen” parody, but it has become obvious to me that a real tutorial will take a great deal of time to compile. I tend to paint areas in spurts and often render background elements completely before laying in flat foreground color, and that makes it hard to follow. Also, it’s apparent to me that I will have to use screen captures to demonstrate palettes, selections and brushes in order to illustrate the steps fully, rather than just saving the image itself as I go. That will be a time consuming process and this deadline won’t allow me the luxury. That said, I did save my painting at various stages to give some idea of the process. This was done in PhotoShop CS2 using the Wacom Cintiq. Details on prepping the page for coloring including scanning, etc. can be found in this post.

The completely colorless inked image is in a previous post below. Here is that same section of the splash with some color added. I always start in the background and work my way forward. I begin adding flat colors using the paintbrush tool. I turn off the pressure controlled opacity so the color is completely flat in most foreground areas, but in the background I like to use slightly transparent color so the palette is a bit more monochromatic. Not true monochrome at all, but just so the colors have a similar tint… it’s a little like atmospheric distortion. So, the pots and pans in the background all have a bluish tint like the mirror/glass surface behind. The kitchen on the show has a “red” side and a “blue” side, made up of small tiles of different shades of the color. I simulated this using the filter>pixelate>mosaic filter to create a somewhat tiled look, and then blurring it using the filter>blur>blure more filter. I don’t use filters much as I think they have an inescapable digital or surreal effect, but I’d still be painting tiny tile squares right now if I hadn’t. I also did some rendering on the pots and pans, glass and flames at this point. It’s easier to render background stuff fully before you work on the foreground. I start with some flat color added to the chef. (more…)