subject: How to draw caricature pictures [print this page] How to draw caricature pictures How to draw caricature pictures
To draw caricature pictures is perhaps not the easiest thing to do but do you even know what a caricature is?
The crucial difference between a caricature and a portrait of a person is the deliberate distorting of the subjects features in the caricature. This can be tricky because you are distorting the features that make up the subject but these make the person recognizable as well, when you are fooling around with the features you risk losing the similarity of the subject. You have to keep a balance between the distortion and the resemblance to minimize the natural look and maximize or accentuate the features that already stand out to create the caricature image. If you lean too much against the natural flow of the face to a person's already natural big mouth you lose likeness, who would draw a caricature likeness of Rolling Stone, Mick Jagger with thin lips and a little mouth or Beatle, John Lennon without a pointy hooked nose and round glasses? It just would not look like John Lennon or Mick Jagger.
An example of what the dictionary might define as a caricature:
1 A representation, especially visual or literary, which the subject has distinctive features, peculiarities that are deliberately exaggerated making them look comical or grotesque.
2 The skill of creating such comic representations.
3 Grotesque imitations or misrepresentations.
To be able to sketch portraits of people with a knowledge and understanding of human faces is very central to enabling you to create caricatures of people. The difference between cartoons and caricatures are none existent, they are the same really as there aren't any differences as far as I can see. Caricatures are simply cartoons of a person or something that you are able recognize specifically as someone or something. When someone is recognizable to the viewer to see in a cartoon format that someone or something would be caricaturized as a caricature. Just to confuse the whole issue a little more, a caricature is not necessarily always a cartoon; it might well be a painting, a sculpture, or perhaps even be a photographic caricature.
You can draw a picture you decided was a portrait but if you have got the proportions wrong and it is still recognizable as being the person you intended it to be then it will be seen by others as a caricature. If you think about it, when the artist's intentions where to draw caricature pictures whether or not they in a cartoon format or any other format the end result is a caricature, no matter what format it was executed in or how it was done but most caricatures are drawn in a cartoon format.
