Monday, June 4, 2012

Norman Rockwell master study progress. 1 hr total so far.

Caricatures!

So I've been playing around a lot more with caricature. It's proven to be really, really challenging. It's all about hierarchy-- finding the primary, secondary, and tertiary features and keeping the exaggerations within that same structure. But sometimes the hierarchy isn't just in the person's face, but the person's face as compared to other people's faces. I've found that it's really helpful to work from a photo reference that includes multiple people, so you can see that a jawline that doesn't really seem like anything special in isolation is actually comically huge compared to other people's. I started out pretty tragically horrible (And I'll post progress lineups so you can see JUST HOW BAD they were) but now they're sort of getting to the point where you can just about tell who the person is. Not groundbreaking by any means, but I'm kind of proud of how much better they've gotten. (These are Steve Buscemi and Tommy Lee Jones, by the way.)