How to Draw a Caricature

Drawing a great portrait of a person is something only a few people can do. It requires a gift and the skill of accurately recreating a person's personality in detail. In some ways, a caricature does the same thing. However, a caricaturist has the advantage of being able to exaggerate certain details about the subject to create a distinctive, often satirical, form of art.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• Regular drawing paper
• Pink school eraser
• Sharpened pencil
• Blending tool

1. Look at photos in magazines of different types of people. Also look through your photo albums to get a sense of peoples' faces in different environments and atmospheres.
2. Examine your subject carefully. Absorb their features and try to memorize their special characteristics. Find something about them that is individual.
3. Notice how your subject's facial feature look in relation to one another. Many people have similar facial features, but it is the way those features compliment one another that give each person a unique look. Figure out how a person's features come together to make them look as they do. This can be something very noticeable, (like an overbite) or something that takes a while to notice (eyes that are too close together).
4. Find a piece of art you like or a live subject who wants to pose for you.
5. Draw their face using bold lines and shadows which compliment those lines. Shadows should be fat, dark and confident. Choose the features which stand out to you and accentuate them.
6. Draw the person's hair with exaggerated shadows (large white areas, very dark areas, etc.) Try to draw the shapes that the hair creates rather than each individual hair.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't stress too much about which features to exaggerate. It is often obvious at first glance. If not, get the person comfortable and see if anything stands out after a while (bite teeth when they laugh or squinty eyes when they smile).
• If you are just starting caricature work, then you may want to draw the same image repeatedly until you begin to develop a style.
• Keep in mind that exaggeration is the key when drawing a caricature. Don't get bogged down by details.