Caricature is all about Exaggeration which helps you create a comic or grotesque effect of a subject you draw. Grab a piece of paper and a pencil and get ready to learn how to give your friends a few chuckles. This is a lesson in how to draw basic caricatures.
Basic equipment you would need for drawing a caricature is a sketchbook, pencils and a subject.
Subject: A caricature can be of any subject like your family, best friend, someone really special, your pet, your neighbour and anyone. Most important thing is that all good caricaturists share the ability to see what is not typical about a person or subject in this case.
Basic Shapes: There are 5 Shapes that will help in drawing a caricature. The body, head, eyes, nose and a mouth.
After knowing the basics, Lets begin drawing a simple caricature. Follow these steps
Step 1: Body –
Lets begin with drawing a small body. It need not to be fancy you can just use basic double line figures with a bumpy belly . Once you have shaped out the body, let’s give it an outfit. The outfit you choose can make the caricature more interesting. For example, you are drawing a caricature of your best friend whose hobby is cooking. Then, you can give a chef outfit to the body shape.
Step 2: Head –
This where the comic part begins. The head is where you exaggerate and make it oversized. For example, your best friend’s forehead is wide. Then make it more wider.
If its round make it circle. There are not so many rules here just a simple rule that can give people a good laugh with the fact that they can identify resemblance of the person with his caricature.
Step 3: Hair –
Lets now start sticking the hair. where your subject has a short wavy hair. Make it more wavy than usual.if its plane then make it just like a sheet of paper or cloth. Use loose strokes and establish the hair. This is one of the areas of the face that you can really exaggerate on. Looking at the reference photo you can see that the front of his hair is plumed up almost like a peacock and this is somewhere that you can really exaggerate the caricature.
Step 4: Eyes –
Like you exaggerated the head, you will have to exaggerate certain portions of the eyes. Usage of vibrant colors will make your caricature’s eye feature look bright and accentuate.
Step 5: Nose –
No matter how the shape of the nose is, you just exaggerate them as simple as that.
Step 6: Mouth –
The mouth and teeth of the subject must be over-exaggerated based on the shape. The shape of the lips will help you understand how much you should exaggerate them.
Note: The shape of the subject plays a very important role and each time a part of the face you work on, exaggeration must be made by keeping the shape in mind. If your caricature’s shape goes out of place, it will no more look like your subject.
Here are few samples where the shape of subject is same yet features are exaggerated.
In our next posts on the same topic we will give you more tips.
