Thursday, April 7, 2011

Happy Birthday, James Garner!


Every year on this date I like to celebrate the birthday of my favourite actor, James Garner. Although I don't have a new caricature in full colour to put up this time, I do have this article I wrote for the "Exagerrated Features" magazine, the quarterly publication for all subscribing members of the ISCA. In it, I describe my own personal working method in creating one of my celebrity caricatures, and I use James Garner as the subject for this tutorial. The series of rough sketches at the top of this post I had done especially for the article, and they demonstrate how I sometimes will help familiarize myself with the subject before developing the final piece of art. I don't always take this step, but I do recommend it as a way of warming up and finding the "design" of the head and face, particularly when you may be struggling to get the likeness. I hope this tutorial will be of benefit to those of you who also enjoy drawing caricatures of celebrities:






Now that you've read all that, you may now relax and enjoy this clip from The Rockford Files to see Jim Garner's expressions for real:

5 comments:

SNeelyArt said...

Pure Awesome! A Rockford File cartoon would be great!

Just wondering how much the drawing would change if you did him via Space Cowboys when he was much older? How much of the intial young version holds up in terms of construction theory?

Katie said...

Thanks for posting! I've been having A LOT of trouble lately dealing with character construction and design, since my thesis film has a lot of characters in it. It's always helpful to see other people's processes.

Unknown said...

awesome!

LaserDatsun said...

Thanks for sharing your methods. Your caricatures are wonderful and imho always amongst the best ones in the caricaturama showdown. Your art is an inspiration.

Ross Irving said...

Working from video, now that you say that it sounds so obvious. I'll be sure to do this from now on. Thank you for giving us some insight on your process.