Self caricature

So, after two months of planning, sketching, rendering and revising, I've finally finished my self caricature, which was done as part of the National Caricaturist Network bi-monthly competition. There were deadlines for each stage, at which point I received a lot of feedback and advice from the judges and fellow NCN members. Overall it was a highly rewarding experience, and a valuable learning opportunity. I did the whole thing in Photoshop, which I had never painted with before. Here's the finished piece, and below you can see the stages I went through to meet the competition deadlines:


The final piece - Click to see detail

The first deadline was to plan out initial concepts in the form of thumbnail sketches. No detail or colour required at this stage, just ideas and general positioning. I decided to use a kung fu theme, substituting a paintbrush for a sword:


Thumbnail sketches - click for a closer look

Then it was time for the initial likeness sketches:

Initial likeness sketch - click for a closer look

I decided to have red paint on the brush, and some red paint streaked across my face, like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. It was then pointed out to me that when drawing a face looking downwards like this, you need to pay special attention to perspective, especially the eyes, the outer corners of which should appear higher than the inner corners. As I'd overlooked this, my caricature didn't look like I was looking downwards, it just looked like I had childlike features, because I'd squashed the bottom of the face up without altering the eyes. Court Jones suggested I picture the head as a cylinder and draw guidelines on it to position the features. So here is sketch number 2:


Likeness sketch 2

So I sorted out the perspective thing, but lost the likeness. Here is my final attempt:


Final likeness sketches - click for a closer look

Good likeness now, but in the one on the left I had drawn it slightly slanted, so I just rotated it - the beauty of digital painting! Next stage was the final comp - a detailed sketch of the full caricature including body and any props. I came up with these three poses:


Final comp ideas - click for a closer look

The first sketch was my initial idea, but I thought the rear arm looked awkward, so altered it to the second one, but this was too rigid. I settled on the final sketch, which was deemed the most 'kung-fu' and dynamic. Again, as I was working digitally, I only had to redraw the arm on each image.

The final stage was colouring. Here's my stages:


Colouring stage 1

Here I just got some colour down and tried to get the eyes looking good, as they are often the main key to getting a good likeness. I was told the right eye looked too cat-like and it was suggested this was because I'd made the highlight too big. I think the green was also too bright.


Colouring stage 2

Now I was happy with the eyes, and started work on the body.


Colouring stage 3

I painted the brush handle green to match my eyes (nice touch!) I painted the t-shirt blue as it was in my source photo, but later decided to change it to white for more contrast, and so I could put some red paint on it, as I decided the paint wouldn't be visible on the shadow side of my face.


Final stage of colouring - Click for detail

Here's the finished piece again. I added some paint streaks to my arms aswell, and spent several hours rendering the jeans, shoes and t-shirt. Overall I'm very happy with the outcome, I think it's definitely my strongest piece to date, and look forward to the challenge of doing an even better one next time!

Tags: caricature, photoshop, digital art