My New Passion: Caricatures

About two years ago, I was asked to draw a caricature of President Obama. My boss at the time, was thinking of creating a political blog and wanted to see what I could come up with. I spent an hour researching other caricatures online to see what other artist were exaggerating in their depictions. I then spent the next hour sketching different ideas until I came up with the fun likeness below.

A couple of years passed, but I had been bitten by the caricature bug! I started paying more attention to other caricature artists, like Jason Seiler, Thomas Richmond, Mort Drucker, Sebastian Kruger, Serge Birault, Russ Cook, and Greg Halbert. When I had some spare time to devote to a personal project, I decided to practice on a caricature of myself.

I posted my likeness above as my profile pic on Facebook and got encouraging feedback. I tried a friend’s caricature and a few celebrities. Soon, I was getting requests for other celebrities and people wanting their portraits painted. I have a long list of friends, family, and celebrities that I want to experiment with.

I had a tons of fun working on this caricature of Charlie Sheen. His lifestyle is making him age beyond his years. I wanted to exaggerate this, and I thought of the likeness of an old family friend, who has a good twenty years on Charlie.

This caricature was a request that I couldn’t resist. Keith Richards has a face for caricature! After finding a great reference, it took me a solid 4 hours to paint this from start to finish, no breaks! Inspiration drove me to sprint through to the finish, but I was sore and exhausted at the end. Next time, when inspiration hits, I will take a few breaks!