Thursday, June 18, 2009

PRACTICE! PRACTICE! PRACTICE!

As a caricature artist, you are an artist. I believe that you should always hone your skills/talent.

Whether you are drawing caricatures or working in any other form of art. Draw whenever, whatever.... Be it caricatures or just drawing from life.

A good example is The Subway Surfer, Elgin, who is drawing people as caricatures on his trips on the subway in New York. Elgin practices his caricature techniques as the train moves along.

Years back when I rode the city bus to work, when I was working for a living 35 years ago as an art director at an ad agency, I drew people on the bus on the way to my job. If I can find some of the sketch pads I will post some of the drawings.

In San Antonio, we do have the Coppini Academy of fine Art. It is named after Pompeo Coppini who was the sculptor who created “The Spirit of Sacrifice,” Alamo Cenotaph, San Antonio Texas. You can see it near the Alamo. If you are interested in knowing more about Coppini ( http://www.coppiniacademy.com/about.html )

They hold classes in life drawing, portraits, still life at very reasonable prices. In life drawing they

have a evening class on Thursday where they do gesture drawings of 5 minutes up to 20 minutes towards the end of the class period. On Wednesday evening they have a life drawing class where the model holds the same pose for the entire evening with breaks every 20 minutes. Usually they have a nude model. When they can’t find a model they ask one of the artists to model nude or clothed. I go to the Wednesday classes mainly because in drawing caricatures at parties I am drawing gestures of the guests’ faces in 3 minutes.

To make a long story short... Last night they could not find a model so they asked one of artists in the still life class held earlier in the day to be the model. I choose just to draw his face as a portrait... after the first 20 minute session. I thought I had a good likeness, but seeing what the other artists saw and was painting or drawing... My drawing had the face to long where the others had a more rounder / square shape. I looked at my drawing and I saw it more as a drawing of me than the model. So I re-drew the model making his face not so long. It was closer but still not right so this morning I took these photos and then took the second drawing and widen the face in photoshop, which is closer to what the model looked like...




Below are a couple other drawings I did in other sessions.







1 comment:

  1. When I first saw the pics without reading the post itself; I thought it was a self portrait.

    ReplyDelete