Couple Caricture Drawing of Dan and Karen

Karen and Dan Caricature Portrait

graphite pencil on paper,  11x14

by Yvonne Ham

This caricature is of my brother Dan and his wife Karen.  It is strange the journey I am on in creating caricatures every day.  I do have a "bible" I am using written by Tom Richmond called The Mad Art of caricatures!  It is available for purchase on his website as a digital download or in book form. 

I scan the internet to looking at examples of caricatures for reference material.   If you  wanting to learn how to create caricatures I highly recommend studying other caricature artists work.

Lets get back to how I worked on the caricature of Karen in particular.   I can't stress enough that using several reference photos helps to get a good idea of the personality of your subject.  If you are doing a live drawing take special care to observe the subjects movements.   Do they squint, slouch, shrug, tilt there head in on direction?   Observation can be your best friend.  

After I put in the dark shadows around the nose on both subjects they began to have a likeness.  Both Karen and Dan have teeth that I exaggerated.   Karen has teeth that sit on her lower lip.  She has a big smile and cheeks that stand out to me.
My brother has a space between his to front teeth.  He also has laugh lines near his eyes.   It is part of their likeness.  

Dan's caricature came quickly finishing it in about an hour.   Karen well, lets say I made several study drawing and non of them came close to her likeness.   I think this is because I didn't add her dark shadows around her eyes or her side lines near the edge of her large cheeks. 

          

In order of how they were drawn.

Yeah, a lot of practice but, still something was not working.

Reference photos of Karen and Dan.

I think I final am happy with the final outcome.   I hope you like my study photos and final original.

Practice can only improve your drawing and visual recognition of your subjects facial clues, making them who they are.

Remember to look at the shape of the head, each eye, the nose, and finally the mouth.   

Hope you enjoyed my process.   Happy drawing!

Visit my website here to enjoy more artwork my me, Yvonne Ham.