Understanding Caricature: An Artist's Practical Guide to Creating Portraits with Personality - Softcover

Houston, Greg

 
9781580935647: Understanding Caricature: An Artist's Practical Guide to Creating Portraits with Personality
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1580935648 ISBN 13: 9781580935647
Verlag: Monacelli Studio, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Understanding Caricature offers a lively guide to an old and respected art form. A great caricature is one that not only captures the subject's look and personality but amplifies them significantly. They are almost always funny and very often (but not always) mean spirited.

A truly comprehensive and laser-focused examination of a really wonderful, expressive art form. Understanding Caricature offers artists, aspiring artists, students, journalists, bloggers, etc. a lively guide to an old and respected art form.

A great caricature is one that not only captures the subject's look and personality but amplifies them significantly. They are almost always funny and very often (but not always) mean spirited. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hairline, cheeks, eyebrows, teeth, chin: There’s no facial feature (or any other body part, for that matter) that can escape the sardonic scrutiny of caricaturist and illustrator Greg Houston. But though he cleverly twists, exaggerates, and distorts each subject’s image, he always makes sure the person remains recognizable - an absolute must for successful caricature.

Whether on assignment or simply drawing for his own perverse pleasure, Houston loves skewering the high and mighty - movie stars, moguls, politicians, and assorted other VIPs - especially when they misbehave. Caricature, says Houston, is a very sharp weapon for the powerless to use against the powerful, and he can teach you to wield it, too.

After defining caricature, differentiating it from other forms of portraiture, and delving into its centuries-long history, Houston gets down to the nitty gritty of how to do it. He focuses sequentially on the face, the hair, the body, and what he calls “accoutrements” - distinctive items of clothing that help viewers immediately identify celebrities.

You yourself will learn to poke artistic fun at the famous through a series of demonstrations that let you follow Houston as he constructs caricatures of Jake Gyllenhaal, Masie Williams, Dwayne Johnson, Rainn Wilson, and other notable victims of his wicked pen. But Houston doesn’t focus solely on his own approach.

A whole chapter of Understanding Caricature is devoted to other contemporary caricaturists and the signature mediums they work in, ranging from traditional oils and watercolors, to digital drawing and painting, to sculpture and even puppet-making. And the book’s final chapter displays the work of students who’ve studied with Houston at his Baltimore academy.

Brilliant in their own right, these pieces also demonstrate how any artist, with Houston’s guidance, can become a skilled practitioner of the caricaturist’s art.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Greg Houston was born and raised in Baltimore, MD. He earned his BFA from Pratt Institute and has been illustrating professionally since 1988. His portfolio is large and stylistically vast. Greg Houston is an award winning illustrator with 30 years of experience. He's worked for all types of clients in nearly all areas of the industry. His goal is simply to continue to create images at the highest level for as long as humanly possible. Specialties: Drawing (ink, color pencil, charcoal, graphite); painting (acrylic, watercolor); portraits; caricatures; landscapes; editorial illustration (narrative, conceptual, stand alone images, sequential images); graphic novels (writing/illustrating).

Greg is a co-founder (since 2015) and instructor at Baltimore Academy of Illustration. Greg also taught at MICA (Maryland) in both the college and pre-college programs and at the online arts site, Craftsy/Blueprint. He's the author of Illustration that Works, Monacelli Studio, 2016. He lives with his wife in Baltimore, MD.

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CHAPTER 3
Style and Medium. . . and How They Affect the Message
 
When I think of the fine artists I like and who have influenced or inspired me the most, my list starts with the absolute master, Gustav Klimt, and includes such luminaries as Egon Schiele, Edgar Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Grant Wood, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz,  Honorè Daumier, Chuck Close, Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, and Joel Peter-Witkin. The common thread among them is that they have very little in common. Each of them has a unique perspective and style that they use to create their imagery. When I think about influences in caricature, I have to start with MAD magazine. The Usual Gang of Idiots influenced generations of artists, cartoonists, illustrators, and caricaturists. Wally Wood, Will Elder, Don Martin, Jack Davis, Mort Drucker (has there ever been a better name for a caricaturist?), et al., kept me laughing as a kid (and as an adult) but perhaps more importantly, they also made me want to draw.
 
The list of fantastic caricaturists from the past goes on and on—Sam Berman, James Montgomery Flagg, Rafael Freyre, Abel Ianiro, Alan Jedia, John Johns, Bill Utterback, Jacques Kapralik, Lou Hirshman. The elegant line and incredible simplicity of Al Hirschfeld amazed me. For somebody as verbose as I am, seeing the way he distilled three-dimensional, multifaceted faces down into the absolute barest of caricatures was like watching a magic trick. He not only kept the resemblance but somehow actually enhanced it. The brilliant work of David Levine, heavy with crosshatching, was equally as engrossing, especially to a fan of line like me. Steve Brodner, Philip Burke, Daniel Adel, Wouter Tulp, and Sebastian Kruger are among the giants in the industry today.

Each has a unique style and way of working and each finds a way into the face he or she is caricaturing. They show us that, as with all art, your caricature style matters. It can tip the scales of how a piece is interpreted. An angry, frenzied mark might make the viewer feel very differently about the subject than a cool, elegant mark might. I work in a few different styles (although, sometimes these are just slight variations on a style). I get bored doing the same thing. I also like to work in a few different mediums, graphite, ink, and acrylic paint primarily. Ultimately, I prefer to swing back and forth in terms of medium and in terms of style—tighter, looser, heavier, lighter, sometimes emphasizing line, shape, color, etc. Most often the medium or style that I choose has a lot to do with the subject I’m caricaturing or the activity they’re involved in, because style and medium can help capture the essence of the subject.
 
An Array of Styles and Mediums

But enough about me.  One of the great things about writing this book is that it allows me to showcase some of the brilliant illustrators/caricaturists whom I  admire. Let’s take this opportunity to look at some of their work to get an idea of the vast the array of styles and mediums they employ to create their incredible caricatures. First, though, back to me for a moment. . . .

Greg Houston. Jack Nicholson (at the time of The Shining, 1980). Ink on paper.
A smile isn’t always just a smile. So in this caricature of Jack Nicholson from around 1980, when the film The Shining was released,  I went with a somewhat maniacal, toothy grin and scary eyes looking up from under the brow. I actually deemphasized his eyebrows a bit, which is counterintuitive when doing Nicholson, but I wanted to draw them down to meet the eyes. I wanted to stress the angularity and heighten the menace by having his vast forehead jut out, like it’s coming at his victim. The black and white of medium and paper gives this piece a crisp, sharp quality, and an immediacy. It seems “quicker,” if you will.

Greg Houston. Jack Nicholson. Acrylic, color pencil, and ink on paper.
This is a caricature of Jack Nicholson in late middle age. I wanted his head to feel heavy and to dominate the space. Nicholson is pretty much teeth, hairline, and eyebrows, but I didn’t want to go that route. I chose to go with the wide grin, because I think there’s a certain look of being content with oneself (and it's not exactly smugness) that Nicholson exuded at this point in his career. For all intents and purposes, he was on top of the world. So, I wanted to give him a certain gravitas in terms of weight but also a look of satisfaction in terms of expression.
 
Greg Houston. Jack Nicholson. Graphite.
Here’s the same piece in pencil before the paint and ink were applied. You can see that I didn't make many changes from final sketch to finish. But you can also see how the color, especially in the background and the jaw area, add weight  Color didn’t change the resemblance, but added to the overall feeling of the final image.
 
Daniel Adel
I love how Adel plays around with proportion and planes. I also love his painting style. His strokes are gorgeous and there’s a kind of chunkiness about them that I find especially compelling. He mixes light and dark, detailed and less detailed areas with an ease that you almost don’t notice. I’m particularly amazed at the way he does the hair in this piece. The likeness is, of course, spot on, and the piece feels like a traditional portrait (which Adel also does, and, as you would imagine, does so beautifully). I’ll tell you this, Antoine “Fats” Domino was a class act, an original and an icon, and with this fantastic caricature, he got the portrait he deserved.

Daniel Adel. Fats Domino. Acrylic.
 
Fernando Mendez C.
This gorgeous Hannibal Lector piece makes it pretty clear that Fernando is staking out an entirely different place on the spectrum of styles one could employ to create caricatures. Despite distorting elements of the head and face, he masterfully uses light and shadow and pays attention to the weight of these elements. Note how he cleverly darkens the background color as it slides down behind the white of the straightjacket, and how the opposite effect is happening at the top of the page.  I’m fascinated by how little he appears to be warping the subject. It’s almost as if he’s not doing a caricature at all, and the likeness is spot on. Of course, if you were to put a photograph of Anthony Hopkins next to this piece the exaggeration would be obvious. But because Fernando has created a piece in which the internal logic is so smart and consistent, he just might make you look at this twice before realizing it’s a caricature. Those glassy eyes, that slight smile, the slicked back hair—it’s just so great. I look at this and hear Hannibal Lector saying. “Hello, Clarice.” Brrrrr. Genius!

Fernando Mendez C. Hannibal Lector. Watercolor.
 
Philip Burke
I’ve been a fan of Mr. Burke for a long, long time. The freedom with which he creates his caricatures is stunning. Take this Jerry Seinfeld caricature. There always two things that strikes me when I look at Burke’s work. One is how he manipulates the planes. When I think of Burke, I think of weight and planes. He has this ability to push the character from the inside out, warping not just faces but bodies and limbs to a point that almost seems too far but never is. I think of his subject as being like a balloon and Burke is pumping in so much air, the faces and bodies are expanding into such loopy proportions, that they might explode and he’ll lose the likeness. But he doesn’t. He manages to get to that...

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Verlag
Monacelli Studio
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1580935648
ISBN 13 
9781580935647
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
176
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