I’ve always regarded Jack Nicholson as an easy face to caricature. But that’s because he’s mostly been caricatured as the Joker, or as a crazy-haired man in sunglasses. This one turned out to be surprisingly difficult. I wanted to capture that very specific dull-eyed stare combined with the sinister grin. It was more trouble than just simply drawing the full-on “here’s Johnny!” face.
In warm ups for this caricature, I tried different sizes of grin, noticing that his mouth actually changed shape a lot. You think of Jack Nicholson as having one crazy smile, but packs a whole arsenal of unsettling expressions. What I went with here was a modified version of a grin that shows all the upper teeth, but only the middle few lowers. It’s bigger for emphasis.
One of Jack’s eyes is usually open just a little wider than the other. It’s not just Jack, actually, that’s common in most people. But I wanted to emphasize that for the sake of making him look crazier, so I pointed the eyes in different directions as well.
Plan A was to find a movie still from As Good As It Gets and draw Nicholson’s grumpy writer character, Melvin Udall. That movie must have been written just for Jack… he’s misogynistic, antagonistic, self-unaware, and an all-around fun bad guy overdue for redemption. But he doesn’t have facial hair in that movie, and his hair is neat and tidy and short, and, I don’t know, I wanted and older, even crazier Jack. Anger Management isn’t nearly as good of a movie, but Nicholson practically caricatures himself as Dr. Buddy Rydell, so I get to draw a caricature of Jack Nicholson playing a caricature of himself.
If you’ve never seen As Good As It Gets, check this out:
