Hey Guys,
In this post, I want to share with you a video I found that show you how to draw personalised caricatures step-by-step for yourself.
The tutorial is by professional cartoonist and illustrator Danny Page and although it only shows the basics, there’s a mountain of information that will be useful for any budding caricature artist. Click here for more information on what a caricature artist does.
If you’d prefer to purchase a professional hand-drawn personalised caricature, check out these guys – they’re my current recommended supplier.
In this clip, I’m going to teach you how to draw caricatures – basically exaggerated cartoon versions of someone’s real face and we’re going to be using Yours Truly as an example.
So, what your going to do is highlight this person’s really obvious distinguishing features. You’re going to take what you see and exaggerate it greatly and in doing so, I don’t know, most of the time it’s just good for a laugh.
So, what do we see in this particular drawing? Well, for one, the subject kind of has a high forehead and he obviously has some other distinct features. We’ll start with the forehead first and we’re going to draw this guys hair going back and we’ll throw a few fun little spikes in there just to exaggerate that there’s a few messy unkept portions of the hair.
So, we’ve established the outer lines of the face and we’ve definitely exaggerated the forehead. Now, what’s the second most obvious feature? That’s right, the glasses, so we’re going to draw those. They’re clear as day – you can’t ignore them. We’re going to draw the outer edges first – there’s nothing really to exaggerate about them except that they’re there. Everything else is going to have to just work around them.
We’re actually going to draw the eyes on top of them. Now we’re going give ourselves some boundaries by drawing in the eyes. I usually like to start by drawing the eyes but in this case, we’re going to make an exception. We’ll draw the eyes coming over over the glasses and they kind of look a little bit far apart, so we’ll exaggerate that as well.
By putting the eyelids in the corners of the eyes, you kind of showcase that they are a little bit far apart. Then we draw the eyebrows also kind of far apart to highlight the fact that eyes are far apart.
Now, let’s give the eyes some life. Take your time and get those as good as you possibly can – they are important. I’m going to make the eyebrows a little a bushier – anything that kind of makes the picture funnier.
Now another big thing is it looks like I’ve kind of got a bigger nose (at least in this picture anyway), so we’re going to draw the base of the nose and the edges of it.
And, it looks like my mouth is kind of small (in this picture anyway) so we’re going to highlight the fact that I have a small smile.
And the pictures coming together already. Fill in a few of the details and make sure the picture’s a little more clear. Kind of pointy ears – they don’t really pop out though so I’m not going to do a whole lot to exaggerate them.
But essentially that is how one would go about drawing a caricature. We highlight the person’s most obvious over-exaggerated features, we jump on them and enhance them, so to speak.
And there you go. That is basically how you draw caricatures.
