Drawing Like a Professional: Shape Design and Facial Features
Assignments
To complete the assignment for this lesson, select a good large photo of a subject you want to draw – or take a caricature rough sketch you did earlier in the course and follow my steps to create a finished drawing like I did here. But do the whole face. Not just one feature. This one should take you a while because you need to slow down and focus on the craft of drawing, more than you have in any of the previous lessons. Make me proud and post your finished drawings to the Proko Caricature group on Facebook for a chance to be included in the final critique video.
After mastering the caricature fundamentals and learning advanced techniques to get better exaggerations, what is there left to do? The short answer… the hard work.
This is the final lesson in the caricature course. And it’s not actually a caricature lesson. It’s a general drawing lesson. Whenever I’ve taught caricature, most students have a hard time making their final sketches look clean and professional.
Elements of Design
Bad Design
Now, of course judging good design from bad can be tricky. There’s never just one answer that everyone will agree looks good or bad because everyone has different tastes.
Good Design
Let’s look at what I think makes for a successful design. To me, this eye has a good strong design. And it’s not about anatomy. A drawing doesn’t have to be rendered realistically and anatomically to look good. Just on an abstract level, the design has to have a pleasing shape and outline. Also, there’s a variety of line types and edges, from hard to soft and even lost. And there’s a full range of values and smooth transitions that create the illusion of three dimensional form.
The best way to get to this point is to draw your caricature in stages, starting simple at first, improving upon it each time you redraw the design. And slowing down at each successive stage. It’s really just about putting more time and effort in and following the procedure of starting simple and building complexity on top of it.
So let’s take a look at how I created this eye on my caricature of actor John C. Reilly. This rough caricature was originally done as a demo for premium students as part of the digital paint sketching lesson. There was no line drawing here. All the shapes were created freehand using a large Photoshop brush. I think it’s a funny sketch and it has a good likeness. But there are some problems with the construction and alignment of features. So, my first step is to flip it over to better see where the problems are, and do a Reilly Abstraction on top of it. Be sure to check out my lesson on the Reilly Abstraction for more information. This legendary drawing method was not actually invented by actor John C. Reilly but by 20th century illustrator Frank Reilly.
Shapes (The Lay-In)
With the Abstraction finished and the features lined up more correctly in perspective, I now redraw the sketch more carefully with just lines. On my first pass over the Abstraction, my lines are light and thin to keep everything as clean as possible. At this “Lay-In” stage I’m only concerned with my first element of design: Shape. I’m drawing the actual shapes of the head and features, but not yet concerned with realistic forms, values or the line quality. This step is simply about shape. Pure abstract shape.
Lines (Calligraphy and Edges)
Now let’s zoom in to just one of the features to work on the next step. If you’re working digitally at home, you should also zoom in close for this stage because it will require some precision and dexterity. With the shapes clearly defined with simple lines, I redraw the shapes while focusing on the quality of the lines. Hard edges are required where there’s a cast shadow or a sharp change in the direction of the forms while softer edges are necessary to show a gradual transition from light into dark. Here, my pencil brush has a bit of line variation, going from thick to thin. So I’m employing a type of calligraphy.
Value (The Illusion of 3D Form)
When shading in a drawing, I find it’s best to build up to the darkest values gradually rather than trying to achieve them right away. So I’ll do one pass over the shadow areas with a single medium value and then get progressively darker where needed, while leaving some areas lighter where there is reflected light. Stan made a great video that shows the entire process of drawing an eye in his course on drawing the portrait. If you want to do good caricatures, you should check out Stan’s portrait course and learn not only the anatomy of the head, but his steps for drawing and rendering it.
Now, you don’t have to always break down your drawings into these distinct steps – especially if you’re more experienced. But if you do have trouble creating good solid design in your caricatures, this attention to process can be really helpful.
By the way, I didn’t choose this photo of John C. Reilly by accident. It has a strong separation of light and dark forms, which go a long way to help me create a better design in my drawing.
In Conclusion
Remember that design is not the same thing as style. There’s room in the world of caricature for every type of visual expression and style, from abstract, sketchy, cartoony or realistic. All of these caricatures have vastly different styles but show all the elements of good design. What this lesson tries to address can be reduced to one basic problem: Carelessness. Caricatures with otherwise decent likenesses and exaggerations are ruined when you don’t take enough care to make sure that your hand follows through on your original stylistic intentions, whatever they may be.
Premium Content
In this lesson, I showed you just the eye. In the premium version of this lesson, I’ve included the rest of the John C. Reilly caricature as well as several more videos where I focus on a careful and disciplined procedure for creating drawings with a strong visual design.
What’s Next
I’ll actually be back with one more video to share some final thoughts on practicing the Art of Caricature.
Assignments
To complete the assignment for this lesson, select a good large photo of a subject you want to draw – or take a caricature rough sketch you did earlier in the course and follow my steps to create a finished drawing like I did here. But do the whole face. Not just one feature. This one should take you a while because you need to slow down and focus on the craft of drawing, more than you have in any of the previous lessons. Make me proud and post your finished drawings to the Proko Caricature group on Facebook for a chance to be included in the final critique video.
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