Read an Excerpt
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 point and stick. No matter how warped his caricatures are, they always look like the subject. It’s a remarkable feat. I think Burke’s mastery of facial architecture and the nuance of the expression allow him to expand and contort his subjects to near impossible heights of lunacy while still making them look 100 percent believable. I look at this piece and I see Jerry Seinfeld. More to the point, I hear Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t question any of it. The other thing that strikes me is Burke’s use of color. He makes an art of applying color in ways that not only create planes and help define the face, but also combine to create completely believable skin tones. I often direct my students to his caricatures as example of how to paint human skin. In addition to caricature, Burke has a lot to teach any artist who wants to understand color and form. He truly is a modern-day master.
Philip Burke. Seinfeld. Acrylic.
ASSIGNMENT: GOING IN STYLE
It’s up to you to develop your own style and figure out what mediums you’re most comfortable using. To that end, I’d like you to draw a caricature. It can be anyone, in whatever medium you choose (pencil, pen, marker, crayon, digital, whatever). Once you have finished, draw it again but try a different style. Maybe looser, maybe tighter. Just see how it goes. There’s no right or wrong, so you can’t screw up. Once you’ve done two, give a third one a try. When you finished all three set them down in a line and take a look at them. Did you learn anything about the face you're drawing that you hadn’t noticed before? Was there a style that you tried in which you felt particularly comfortable? Uncomfortable? Perhaps each style presented you with some small trick or element that you can incorporate into your natural or normal style. Think of style as a snowball rolling down a hill. Over time, you’ll start to add little flourishes here and there as you round out your style the snowball gets bigger. Be especially aware of the mistakes you make. Embrace those mistakes. Learn from them. They might just end up taking you down a stylistic path you never intended. Ultimately, you learn a lot more from the mistakes than you do from the successes. Enjoy!
DEMO: MEDIUMS
Greg Houston. The Dead Eyes of Mark Zuckerburg. Graphite and ink.
When you talk about mediums you also have to talk about the implements you use to apply them. Brushes and pens (and these can also include digital brushes and pens) vary as much as ink and paint. So, apart from learning the medium itself, you also have to learn your way around the implement.
Here’s an example of the same caricature of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that I did in two mediums—graphite and ink. With graphite you see how, in the first example, I can get a softer line and I can smudge it for shading. I did the second caricature in ink with a crow quill, which is my implement of choice when working in ink. A crow quill is an old fashioned dip pen. You dip it into a bottle of ink to fill the well in the nib and start drawing. It takes a lot of time to master the crow quill, but when you do, you get a wide variety of line language (that is to say, line weight, the thicks and thins). Sometimes the nib catches the grain of the paper and splatters, and you can incorporate this splatter into your work. It can definitely be maddening, but if you stick with it, the crow quill is a fantastic option. Here’s a tip: I prefer the Globe nib. It’s big and looks like an ace of spades. I included an image of one in the second drawing. It holds a lot of ink and gives you a huge variation in line. Also, it’s heartier than the smaller nibs, so it won’t break, bend, or cross as easily (the small tines have a tendency to cross over one another . . . bad news).
I also did the third iteration of Mr. Zuckerberg in ink but with a brush pen. I don’t love the brush pen but I know a ton of folks who do. Like the crow quill, it’ll give you lots of line variation. Work you do with a brush pen tends to have a “fast” look to it. You can see here that I simplified my lines in this third image. The little lines that I used in the second piece to indicate shading are completely gone. For me, the brush pen doesn’t offer that kind of delicate work, so I just went with fewer, bolder lines. The three pieces may not seem wildly different from one another but the choices I made based on medium and implement differ greatly. The limitations and benefits that I got from each drawing implement were different and influenced the stylistic choices I made. Yet nothing I did could change those cold, dead eyes. They just . . . keep . . . staring at me. So cold.
