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Caricatures, Sort Of

8 years ago546 words

What I find most interesting about art is that it allows us to see another's subjective view of the world; I've talked about this a bunch of times before. So I prefer stylised works such as caricatures over photorealism (why paint what a camera could produce?). Extreme caricatures aren't the direction I want to take my own art in, though I do like the idea of exaggerating features to capture the 'essence' of an appearance rather than just its literal, objective features.

A comment first to follow-up the previous post: I'm in the university halls of residence now. I haven't met any of my housemates! I think I'm going to be sharing with six girls and another guy, though I'm not sure. Originally only the one guy was here, but he was with people so I felt weird about greeting him in the shared kitchen or something. I think maybe one other person has moved in now, but I haven't seen them either. It feels awkward, sharing like this with people I've yet to meet, but hopefully I'll become acquainted with them in time... Likely when everyone's moved in, which will probably be next week.

My classes start next Monday, so I've got a week of essentially free time which I'd like to spend on the games/apps that I'm trying to make. I need to do graphics, but I haven't drawn in ages, so I thought I'd practise that a bit. I want to join the university's art society, too, so it'd be wise to prepare for that. Mostly these days I draw people, naked, but it's embarrassing to show those off... so focusing on portraits for a while seems like the best course of action. Portraits of people that others might actually recognise seems like the best way of provoking interest in what I've drawn.

So, I used ∞ this random celebrity photo site thing ∞, and painted some of the faces that came up. Here are a few:






Can you put names to these faces, though? Likenesses are particularly tricky to capture, especially when exaggerated, and I feel I'm still too much of an amateur to do a decent job of it. So I'd be very interested to hear who you think these are!!

I found ∞ this article about caricatures and psychology ∞ interesting. It talks about how our brains possibly recognise faces by comparing how their individual features vary from some abstract average face, rather than storing all the specific features in some 'raw' form. It also includes four caricatures of the same face by different artists which look entirely unalike; you get the same results if you google "[celebrity name] caricature", which I find quite fascinating. I did that with the celebrities I drew myself, and it was interesting how some of the (far better than mine) results looked like how I perceived that person while others didn't. I wonder if different people would choose different ones that looked right to them.

Anyway, now I'm probably going to do some more of these!