Every now and then I get the urge to try my hand at caricature, and this year I was lucky enough to be commissioned to do a 50th birthday portrait of a friend’s husband, and that inspired me to do a caricature portrait for a neighbour’s birthday card.

Classic Portraits

I used to spend hours capturing a portraits’s precise likeness. I did it with my Bob Marley charcoal sketch (which took me many sessions over a month to finesse), and I battled with my pastel self portrait for weeks. I know I can capture a likeness (with time and patience), but as I get older I’m less inclined to invest the time in capturing this level of likeness. I’d rather speed through a portrait instead. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned on this creative journey, it’s that you’ve got to love your natural style, rather than trying to fight it.

Urban Sketching People

Nowadays I’d much rather focus on capturing a scene as it happens, and sketching people as quickly as I can. That’s the beauty of urban sketching, each sketch is a sum of its whole. It’s a combination of lots of elements that work together to capture a moment in time, and capturing an exact likeness of facial features isn’t a requirement.

My 2023 Caricatures

At the heart of caricature is the art of capturing what makes a person different.

We’re all put together differently, made up of large and small shapes, and we all have features that are more prominent or distinctive than others. Sketching caricatures relies heavily on identifying these features and exaggerating them.

My Beach Cowboy Caricature

On this caricature I not only exaggerated his features, but I also made his hat more prominent, giving him a cowboy vibe.

My Elvis Caricature

On this caricature I emphasised his wild hair, and made a feature of his glamourous embroidered shirt. His features got ‘all shook up’ a little – eyes smaller and jaw wider.

With this sketch I realised I like identifying a “theme” to add a vibe to my caricatures. In a recent Roz Stendahl (Instagram: @rozstendahl) tutorial she talked about making the eyes a key feature, and this often meant down-playing other elements like the clothes, so as not to detract from the face. But in this Elvis inspired caricature, the shirt was a key element of the inspiration, so I kept it as it’s original colour.

I’m looking forward to exploring more caricatures in 2024. I’m not planning on abandoning my urban sketching, but portraits have a particular fascination.