The Mouth: Smile Lines
Don’t do this:
These smile lines are too heavy.
Do this:
This is a better way to show smile lines
If you lay in those smile lines so dark, you’re going to end up with a pretty weird-looking face. Just about everybody has these lines, from babies to seniors, but I find it best to add them during the coloring process, not here.
The Eye, Step-by-step. Click to enlarge.
“But I don’t want to learn formulas! I want to learn to draw.”
Drawing with a marker requires you to make a lot of very fast decisions. If you’re new to this, you can be overwhelmed and disheartened very quickly. This stuff is hard to learn.
Learning formulas to quickly draw features will remove one task from your crowded brain. You’ll be more able to focus on placement, line weight, shapes, planes, and carrying on a conversation.
Once learned, these formulas can be adapted to any face, changed, or forgotten. The important thing is that they make your task more endurable now.
If you’re going to learn how to draw caricatures and cartoons, you need to start by drawing this, the Most Average Guy In The World:
An average guy... click to enlarge
Grab a marker and paper.
Draw this guy exactly as he appears. If you can do it, skip ahead to the advanced lessons. If you can’t, do it nineteen more times. I make all Cartoon Vegas employees go through this exact exercise.
Obama
Here’s a younger, less-stressed Obama caricature! This was drawn shortly after he took office. His hair was still black.
Robert Pattinson
Robert Pattinson. His hair got smaller, but that’s not how I want to remember him.
Twilight came out in 2008, and as you can see, this caricature of Robert Pattinson is from 2009. We had plenty of celebrity gossip magazines lying around, to draw from of course, and this guy, along with Kristen Stewart, was in every single one of them. His face was fine, but of course what I really wanted to draw was that hair. He was a tall guy with a pretty big head to begin with, and that hair just made him massive. Even if he was in the background of a photo, he would dominate, with that huge pale face popping in the flashbulbs and the hair standing above everyone.
I can’t remember why I drew him smiling. He’s pretty well known as a grumpy, moody vampire, and though he does plenty of smiling in photos, it’s usually better to try to match the public persona in a caricature. Whatever the case, here’s a happy vampire.
Johnny Depp
This caricature is another example of me being unable to find something to exaggerate. When that happens, I just pretty much draw a portrait, although if I can make bigger hair or something I’m happy to do it. Johnny Depp has big, expressive eyes and a tiny mouth, so it shouldn’t have been too difficult, but you never know where the muse is going to strike.
Chris Rock
Chris Rock caricature by Tielman Cheaney.
So, teeth are one of those aspects of caricature that are hard to get right. Try to clearly delineate every tooth, and you end up with a pretty weird-looking mouth. It just looks like sloppily-made graph paper wedged in there. Don’t put enough detail, and it looks like you forgot to draw something important.
Fortunately, I’m really making fun of his big teeth here. So I just made them big, uneven, and prominent. The lower lip overlapping the microphone was a mistake if I remember correctly, but it works.
Angelina Jolie
Sure, I could have made the lips bigger. But there are already plenty of caricatures of her with a life-raft for a mouth. I’m being gentle.
This one’s pretty old. I think it may have been one of my first caricatures every where I was really trying to exaggerate. Prior to this, I was just trying to make it look like the person. By any means necessary.
Bill Clinton
Here he is, the 42nd President of the U. S. A., Bill Clinton.
In caricatures, we’re always trying to spot the unique features on everyone’s face. And with Mr. Clinton, there’s plenty of uniqueness. His eyes are small, nose is large, eyebrows are nonexistent, haircut is signifigant, and face is red. But there’s nothing to unique about his mouth. So I just left it out.
As a freelance artist, I’m often tapped to draw political cartoons for people that want to make t-shirts and bumper stickers to promote their points of view. During the Clinton years, I was approached time and again to make fun of the president. The captions, situations, and angles of attack varied, but one thing was constant: Everyone wanted me to draw him with a cigar. I can’t think of another representation of the years in office as iconic as that cigar.
James Dean
Here’s the first caricature ever uploaded to http://cartoonvegas.com. James Dean, by Tielman Cheaney. Uploaded in 2008, I must have drawn this earlier, in 2006 or 2007.
I just learned two interesting things about James Dean:
1: His front teeth were fake. He would pop them out to surprise dinner guests.
2: He died before Rebel Without a Cause, the movie that made him an icon, was released. And, two hours before his fatal car crash, he got a speeding ticket.