My suggestion for you to prepare for the next lesson is to familiarize yourself with the standard adult male head and create your own diagram including the appropriate marks showing the proportions and divisions.
I'll take this class later in late summer 2023. For now, I like to share my piece here. It's my first attempt to draw caricatures of various people from different countries.
Hello Court, hello everybody, I'm very happy to join your classroom as I am fond of caricature and you are a maestro ! I would be very grateful if you look at my caricatures of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin. Thanks a lot. Best regards, Arno.
So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to understand the average face. I suppose it's very complicated - the way we recognize faces and process visual information. There's too much biological, psychological, etc. science stuff that is beyond me but I discovered this thing called a composite portrait where different faces are used to create an average. A lot of interesting stuff. I don't know if it's in the premium course but could you make a video or discuss the idea of the "average face" more?
It's easy to get tripped up thinking a lot about what the average face is. But don't put too much stress on it. It's not so much a scientific anatomical principle but rather a personal psychological construct. I think it's true, that, in general, most adult peoples' heads tend to follow the rule of thirds on the face (equal spacing from hairline to brow, brow to bottom of the nose, bottom of nose to the chin) and some other common qualities like the distance between the eyes being one eye width apart. And you can rely on a few of those big picture concepts when thinking about what to exaggerate.
But what is more important than the "average head" diagram is your own personal gut feeling about what average means to you. For me, the average face is the average sum of all the faces I've ever drawn. I started as a live theme park and party artist and have drawn a hundred thousand people or more. So I have a pretty big reservoir to draw upon. The more faces you draw, the better your internal library of faces will become that you can base your exaggeration choices on.
Yeah it's not easy to do ... I'm a little turned off by how "make your own average face!" is tossed out there for people who might want to draw caricatures of people who aren't white male western europeans. As if it's easy.
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Freelance commercial illustrator and caricature entertainer. He’s done a lot of editorial and product illustration and concept work for film and TV.
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Assignment
My suggestion for you to prepare for the next lesson is to familiarize yourself with the standard adult male head and create your own diagram including the appropriate marks showing the proportions and divisions.