I tried to caricature Benedict Cumberbatch

Hey everybody, today we are going to attempt a quick caricature of Benedict Cumberbatch. He's relatively easy to caricature because this one very unusual thing about his head is his eye spacing. His eye spacing is very wide. So let me get a cleaner piece of paper here. And we're going to start with just an egg shape. I don't draw the whole cranium and everything for faces from the front. I just make an egg. And that is not the actual shape of his head. That is a placeholder. Notice I have it at a slight angle this way because his head is slightly tipped. But you can do it straight up and down if it's easier. Now remember, on a caricature, whatever is average about the head, we leave alone. So we're going to measure his eye placement and see if it is indeed centered on his head. I have to estimate where the top of the skull is because his hair has a lot of body to it. Are these units exactly the same? You can measure it on the screen. They are really close to being the same, right? So we're not going to mess with that proportion. We're going to put the eyes across the middle of the head. And you can check your own work to make sure they're in the middle by doing like this. And remember, anything that's average, we leave alone. We do not modify it for the sake of a caricature. That's why average-looking people are incredibly hard to caricature. Because what do you exaggerate? And that's why most Hollywood actors are difficult to caricature because they are, by definition, their faces fall within fairly narrow norms because, after all, we consider them to be incredibly good-looking, which means falling within certain norms. Okay, so here's where his face does get unusual. If we measure the width of an eye and we compare this width to this width, see, they're the same. That's what we expect, right? That's the eye width is the same as the eye-to-cheekbone width. And we can do that on the other side. And this width is the same as this width. So this is average. But now let's take a look at how much room we have in the middle. And that is at least an eye and a half. So his eyes are relatively far apart. Can everybody perceive that? So in a caricature, we're going to take that and exaggerate it. We're going to give him, like, maybe two eyes separation in the middle. And then we're going to... So we're going to end up with eye spacing like this. And, again, if we didn't know how to measure normal eye spacing, we would have no idea that that would be a good move. But I think it'll be effective. So we're going to follow the same method that we've been learning for all faces from the front. We do the height of the eyes, then the eye spacing, and now we're going to do the shapes of the eyes. And if you're working from a digital reference, it's always a good idea to zoom way in so you can see that shape clearly. I'll zoom in on my drawing, too. And, as usual, the inside corner of the eye drops below the center line. His outside corners curl up a little more than usual, so I'm going to exaggerate that curl. I'm going to bring it up a little higher than usual. A little higher than it actually is, I mean. And then we're just going to come over the top like that. Then we're going to add the eyelid form, which is, we're not going to exaggerate that at all, because those are perfectly normal eyelids. And we end up like that. Most of you are going to want to draw that eye way too big, but trust me, that's not going to work. He doesn't have big eyes, and it would be a mistake to make them bigger than they are. We're going to do the same thing on the other side. We're dropping down past the line, and then exaggerating this curl upward. And sometimes we see asymmetry from one eye to the other. There's a little asymmetry here. This one is on a little sharper of an incline, and this eyelid is a little skinnier, especially right in the middle. It gets skinny right there because this form right here, some artists, believe it or not, call this sausage. It's like this fullness of skin underneath the brow ridge. That sausage form is actually pressing down over the eyelid a little bit. So that fullness is conveyed by showing the narrowing of the lid. And you'll recall that I encourage you to look for the negative spaces around the iris when drawing the whites of the eyes. So, and I call these shark tooth shapes. You want to just copy those shapes precisely, the shapes of the shark teeth, and then the iris will appear in the right place in between them. And that's a good hack because the slightest dislocation of the iris will lead to an error in what's called the gaze, G-A-Z-E, and the gaze is the direction the person is looking. So it's very easy to make somebody look cross-eyed or wall-eyed, which is the opposite of cross-eyed if you don't carefully draw these shark teeth in the correct proportions. Okay, as I've mentioned before, a very common error is to place the pupil too far down on the iris. And the reason people do that is because they don't notice that the iris is more covered on top than it is on the bottom. So you want to notice that the pupil is basically touching the upper lid, but there's a good gap between the pupil and the lower lid. So we're going to draw the pupils on both sides like this, touching the upper lid, not the bottom lid, and then we're going to shade the irises. People vary a lot on the space between the eyelid and the eyebrow. On some people, especially females who pluck their eyebrows, you might find the eyebrow way up here. It's important to notice that that's not what we're seeing here. The eyebrow is going all the way down to here. In other words, there's only about an eyelid's distance between the eyelid and the eyebrow. And then another way we can use fractional thinking is to compare the width of the eyebrow to the width of the eye, and you'll notice they are about the same. That would mean that he has what we'd call bushy or broad eyebrows, and so that's something in a caricature that we could exaggerate a little bit. So let me zoom out again. You can get a sense of what we're looking at here. And so we're going to drop that eyebrow just about almost touching the lid, and we're going to make it even wider than the eye. However, he has the reverse of a unibrow. His eyebrows are really widely spaced, as are his eyes, so we're going to make them even wider spaced. So we're giving him these big, broad eyebrows that are really far apart, and then we're just going to do a little first shading across the forms to show that they are darker than the skin, followed by a few accent hairs to show that we're kind of looking at eyebrows. Okay. The next question we want to ask ourselves is, is his nose as wide as the space between his eyes? Remember, we learned that that's an average, and yes, it is. And we could also ask ourselves if the bottom of his nose is centered between his brow ridge here and the bottom of his chin here. And I would say that it is. You can measure that for yourself, but the length of the nose is average, as is the width. So we're going to go draw what we see here. When I look at the shape of this rectangle, I feel like I'm going to need to just elongate the chin a little bit, and that means elongating the top of the head, too. So we're checking to make sure this distance from here to here is the same as this distance from here to here. Okay. Now, when I check your work, a lot of times I'll see corrections that are actually errors. Like, you drew it right the first time, and then you erased it, and you made it wrong. And one of the most common times that people do that is with the nose. They will draw construction lines for the nose, draw it the right way, and then they will erase it, and they'll draw it again much smaller than the construction lines they made. And when I ask them why they did that, they say, well, it just didn't look right. It looked too wide. Trust me, you have no idea what people look like yet because you haven't practiced enough. You have to trust your construction lines. So we are going to be very careful about drawing exactly what we see, and we're going to fill this entire space. We're going to start, as we always do, with the curve for the tip of the nose, which is like a smile. Then we're going to draw the teardrops on either side. Notice that his teardrop nostril forms angle up pretty sharply, so we could make them angle up even a little more than they do. That's another caricature move. And his ala forms, which are these curves around the nostril, are pretty high on him because of the angle of the nostrils. So we could place them even higher. And again, there are just hundreds of little averages that you have to understand in order to intelligently caricature somebody. I'm feeling like the tip of my nose needs to be just a little flatter. And these are the plane changes where the ala transitions to the body of the nose. I'm going to indicate a little plane change here and here. And the bridge of his nose is very wide. You see that? It goes like... So we're going to do a little shading here and here, and that's going to show the viewer that the bridge of the nose covers this whole broad space in between. So again, slight exaggeration of the angle of the nose because that's a little bit unusual, but no exaggeration of the width. Slight exaggeration of the width of the bridge of the nose. Okay, we're going to look at his mouth now. Well, first let's look at his mouth placement. Yep. Okay, so we're going to mark the length of the philtrum. The line between lips is going to be 1 3rd of the way down. That's average, so we're not going to mess with it. So this is 1 3rd and 2 3rds. The shape of the mouth is pretty easy. It's just instead of having a real cupid's bow, it's more of a V shape. So it goes like up and then up a little more. And it's a little asymmetrical. This goes up a little higher and this goes straight, so we're going to make that go exactly straight. Okay, he's got a big wide curve here for the bottom of his philtrum. Notice how lightly I drew that? And I'm going to just indicate the upper lip with very, very faint shading. And he's got a fairly wide lower lip. I'm going to make it a little extra wide. So there's a little dimple at the outside corners of the mouth. And like I said, his bottom lip is pretty full. Now we're going to zoom out again. What's different about his chin, anybody? It's very wide. So we're going to do a really wide curve for the chin. We're going to exaggerate that a little. Wider than the mouth, quite a bit wider than the mouth. And what about his cheekbones? Yeah, they're very angular and prominent, so we're going to make them more angular and prominent like this. And his jaw actually is not that square. It angles in pretty sharply. And then it turns right here below the corner of the mouth. Okay, and we're going to zoom out now and do the... What about his forehead? Do we have any opinions about his forehead? It's really wide, right? His overall shape of his head is a V shape. You see that? It's narrow at the bottom and wide at the top. So we're going to make his forehead even wider. We're going to exaggerate that. And then he's got pretty big hair. Remember, the hair goes up above the level of the skull. So the hair is going up there. And we've got a noticeable plane change here. You see that plane change? See how I indicate that with some hatched lines? And another one on this side. And there's also a plane change here and here. Yeah, we can add his wrinkles. We don't want to make him look too old, though. So we want to go like this for the plane changes around the ala. He's got no bags under his eyes at all. He does have slight crow's feet. And he has ears, obviously. So caricature involves a lot of revision. They don't always work exactly how you think they're going to work. I'm not going to assess mine until I've done at least a first shading on the hair. Because he's obviously not blonde. And I'm also going to give him a little bit of a... Let's practice when we do caricatures. One way we show the world that we're trying to do a caricature is we give him a tiny body. So let's give him a tiny little neck. It's a funny thing, caricature. I actually collect old English prints. And I have a couple from the early 1800s that are considered some of the first caricatures in the modern style with the large heads and the tiny bodies. So you can invent your own pose for the body if you want. I'm just going to give him a sassy little hands-on hips pose. You can do the body any way you want. I'm going to zoom out a little so you can see everything. I feel like I could have caricatured him a little more. It sort of just looks like I tried to draw him. Maybe I can show my YouTube viewers at home some of your drawings. You're sharing it to all my 960 subscribers. You don't have to share if you don't want, and you don't have to put your name on it. I think my audience does like to see the classwork sometimes. There's people all over the world right now that are virtually enjoying being members of this class. No, it's not live. Should I do live streams? Do you have to put a chat with it if you do live stream? I wouldn't have to have a chat turned on, would I? Oh, my students? I thought we had the private school experience here. I wonder if anybody's parents watch these. I wonder what my kid's really learning in their art class. Some parents follow you on Canvas, so they can see the assignments. No, but my assignments all have links to the YouTube videos. Notice his eyes are in shadow, so leaving the whites of the eyes white is kind of a mistake. I'm going to shade over them a little bit. Yeah, that's about as good as I'm going to get today. I think my viewers will be more inspired by your videos. I mean, by your drawings. Okay, here's one. Oh, I've got to zoom out. Very nice. Looks like a weasel and his hair looks like this person. Yep, he actually looks a little better looking in your drawing. Almost like John Kerry or something. Very good. Thank you for sharing. Anyone else want to share their drawings? Okay. And here's another one. Very nice. Thank you. Okay, before we leave today, we're going to quickly look at some more submissions. There we go. Very nice. Yeah, this I think... Yeah, you went further apart in the eyes than I did, and I think it's very effective. And nice. Very good. And are there any furries watching? You might appreciate this one. And fantastic. This is our first character for this group, so I'm very, very pleased with these results. Okay. And that'll do it for today. Thanks for watching. Remember to like and subscribe. We're coming in on 1,000 subscribers. Okay, see you later.