Earthsworld Photos and Sketch Challenge

If you’re into sketching portraits, @earthsworld instagram feed has a plethora of inspiration. Their photos are full of character, and make ideal portrait photos for caricature experimentation.

Taking it a step further, Christophe Swijsen is the admin for a Facebook group called Drawing Earthsworld Challenge. Each day he posts a new Earthsworld photo and sketch, and encourages members to post their own versions.

December 27th Challenge

I bound my own watercolour sketch book earlier this year, and have been using it to participate in the daily Earthsworld challenge. Many of the portrait attempts have been too ugly to post, but after a week of failed attempts I was happy with how this latest one turned out.

Here’s the source Earthsworld photo:

Here’s the morphed Earthsworld photo:

I used the free version of an app called Body Editor Lite to mess around with the layout of the face, and to create a more dramatic image.

Even though eyes are the area of focus in 99% of portrait sketches, in this photo I was enamoured with the mouth and ears, so warped them even more to use as inspiration for my final sketch.

Pen and Watercolour Caricature:

Although a lot of caricature artists I’ve encountered on YouTube use a pencil sketch to base their final sketch on, I prefer to go straight in with pen. Yes there are some lines that could be considered mistakes, but I like this rough and ready approach, and think these happy accidents add to the portrait’s personality.

As with my previous caricature attempts, I still don’t feel there were enough areas of white, but I did manage to not be as heavy handed with the application of watercolour.

Now that I’ve done a few of these loose style portraits I’m realising that I’m favouring a specific limited set of paint colours for the skin tone:

• Quin Rose
• Burnt Umber
• Raw Sienna
• French Ultramarine

This use of two of the popular earth tones is new to me, and it has been fun to experiment with the different shades these combinations create. I feel a face-tone swatch project coming on!