Q: I’m enthusiastically working through your book. Aside from enjoying the art and fantastic tips, I’m really interested what you said about it taking 500 faces to really get the nuances of caricature / portraiture.

So to fully understand…. maybe naively so, I have set out to draw 500 faces. I really want to at least begin to recognize all the subtleties you mentioned… and to overcome some of the challenges I’ve faced while drawing portraits. A friend of mine said that it takes 1,000 attempts at a particular activity to beome an expert. My goals isn’t really to become an expert (a half expert is fine with me) so much as to further my own art and to help me grow as a hobbyist.

What else would you recommend artists do to grow and become better at achieving a likeness?

A: I think you are mistaking the difference between caricature and likeness. Here is the quote from the book to which this question refers:

The Mad Art of Caricature, Page 12:

In caricature, the old adage of “practice makes perfect” has never been truer. The ability to see doesn’t spring up overnight, and I often tell eager young caricaturists they have about 500 or so bad caricatures in them before they start noticing the subtle things that hide inside the ordinary face.

By the term “see” I am talking about not necessarily the ability to DRAW or to capture a likeness, which can be done without any exaggeration. I am talking about the ability to observe and notice the things about a face that makes it unique—the things that a caricaturist is going to want to exaggerate to create a caricature as opposed to a portrait. The “500 or so bad caricatures” I say a new caricaturist has in them is not about improving drawing skills or capturing a better likeness, it’s about developing your eye to notice those unique things through the simple medium of observing and then drawing what you observe. Of course the act of drawing over 500 caricatures will also improve an artist’s drawing skills as well as their observational skills as it pertains to simply seeing the facial features that a likeness requires be accurately drawn immensely, but it’s the development of the ‘eye’ to which I refer in that quote.

Additionally, those 500 drawings are not a threshold wherein drawing number 501 is like some switch was suddenly switched on and an artist’s drawings suddenly become successful. I actually use that number with my new theme park artists as saying that is about when they stop fighting with the tools and medium, start getting comfortable in the chair and faces start to look different to them as things jump out that previously went unnoticed. It is still an ongoing process, and at the end of the next 500 drawings, number 1,001 will look very different than 501 did as long as they continue to apply themselves.

Now, as to your actual question about what else (besides practice) an artist can do to improve their ability to capture a likeness…

Nothing. There is nothing else besides unyielding dedication and sheer, unrelenting observing/drawing that will help an artist become better at getting a likeness. Studying and incorporating different techniques are important, and can help an artist along the way, but there are no shortcuts. No amount of studying, reading, watching videos, listening to lectures or other sources of information on drawing can replace the act of drawing and what that does to your ability to make your eyes, hand and brain work together. It’s like swimming. You can read about how to swim, you can look at diagrams of the action, you can watch videos and have classroom instruction in swimming. Until you actually get in the water and start moving around, you will never be able to swim.

That is advice nobody really wants to hear, but it is the absolute truth. Talent is only part of the recipe. The most talented artist in the world would not be more than a mediocre artist if they never bothered to work at developing their skills. Modest talent with enormous work ethic and determination will beat out enormously talented but lazy artists every time.

Thanks to Steven White for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

After my post on Wednesday about how the accurate drawing of features does not necessarily create the only path to a caricature’s “recognizability”, I received an interesting email from my friend and superstar cartoonist Rick Kirkman, artist of the widely syndicated comic strip Baby Blues. Rick mentioned how he sometimes does a type of caricature with his strip and its animated TV version, where he has to “Baby Blues-ize” famous people—and I’ve seen him do it for soldiers on the USO trips we’ve taken. He also mentioned how this is frequently done on The Simpsons, Futurama and other animated shows. Another friend, Pearls Before Swine creator Stephen Pastis, does a similar thing with a self-caricature in his strip.

The trick to this, as Rick points out, is to stay true to the character design so the caricature looks like it belongs in that cartoon’s universe. A tough thing to pull off sometimes, and one that definitely requires the use of elements other than the facial features to create recognizability.

The above “caricature” of me was done a few years ago using the “Simpsonize Me!” website that promoted the Simpson’s movie. That website is now closed down, but I did the above with a little bit of customizing back then.

A: I have a question (and I don’t think I’ve seen it answered yet!)! Has there ever been a face that no matter how many pictures, video or resources you look at, you just can’t get a grip on it? Myself, I specialize in a variety of anime stylizations, but there’s this one face (Nathan Fillion to be specific) that no matter what I try – anime, traditional caricature, or realism – I can’t quite get it! I’ve been able to create some drawings that people recognize without me having to give clues, but it’s not quite satisfying ME. If you do have one of these sorts of Achilles heels, do you have any tips or strategies to overcome it?

Q: Well, I did have almost the same question asked a while ago, but this one is asking from a little different angle… why do caricaturists sometimes struggle with a certain face and is there a way to overcome it?

Faces are faces. Basically we all have the same physical features. It’s the subtle differences in perception that the caricaturist is trying to figure out and then accentuate. Why, then, would one face be harder than another?

In some cases it’s just a matter of the face itself not giving you enough information to work with. The so called “plain faces” that do not seem to have any outstanding features for a caricaturist to grab hold of. I find that to be a lack of observation rather than a lack of features on the part of the subject. Maybe someone has nothing obvious to exaggerate, but that should never stop an artist from attaining a likeness. All that needs doing is to draw the features as they really look to attain a likeness. That has nothing to do with exaggeration. The trick with caricature is to both exaggerate AND attain a good likeness. Drawing the features accurately but making poor choices in exaggeration will kill the likeness. In general the struggles one might have with a “nondescript” face is that they cannot see anything to exaggerate so therefore just exaggerate blindly or at random. That is like shooting with a blindfold on… you might occasionally get lucky and hit the target, but you usually miss.

I believe when an artist struggles with a recognizable person like your example of Nathan Fillion, it is because they have lost objectivity. They entered into the drawing with a preconceived perception of what the subject looks like and what they needed exaggerated, and are then not objective about drawing that person’s caricature. If their preconceived perception is wrong, they can’t get past that and insist on trying to shoehorn their caricature onto the face, rather than letting the face dictate the caricature. You have to be able to approach the subject with an open mind and set preconceived notions aside.

There are a few ways around this problem I’ve found effective:

• Set aside the drawing for a day and come back to it with a fresh eye. If you are working on a deadline that might not be possible, but if it is that seems to be the best solution. It is easy to get “too close” to a drawing and lose objectivity. Take a long break from it and do some other drawing of an unrelated matter in the meantime. Draw a car or a chair or something non-organic.
• Toss out all your photo reference and get new ones. It’s possible your reference is confusing you. Pictures can lie and you might be fixated on a single picture or something you think you percieve from that picture that isn’t right. In one picture a subject may look like they have a big jaw but it could be the angle or lighting fooling you. Toss them all out and dig up fresh ones.
• Work from a video. Put in a DVD with the subject in it in the player or computer and work up a page of sketch studies of the face. Moving images cannot lie as well as pictures. You will be working from a more true perception of the face.
• Adjust the scale of the drawing and study it. I do this a lot. I find a drawing looks a lot different when it is smaller or larger than the size I am working at. Step back from the drawing board and look at the sketch, or use a magnifying glass to enlarge. Better yet, scan it in and adjust the zoom on the image in PhotoShop. You may notice where you are having problems. You might even try and flip the drawing and look at the mirror image of it. That is more about seeing the structural problems of a drawing, but it may help you figure out the problems.

Great question. Thanks. I’ll do Nathan Fillion as this week’s “Sketch o’the Week” and see if I can do something with his face.

Thanks to Jade Gordon for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!