A caricature of comedic legend, Leslie Nielsen who passed away today aged 84. Growing up, I first discovered his work on 'Airplane' (titled 'Flying High!' here in Australia), then after seeing the 'Naked Gun' movies, rented the 'Police Squad!' series. When it came to slapstick comedy he was one of the best.
This was a shaded pencil drawing scanned and blended in Photoshop.
Edit 1st December- I uploaded a new version after I was disappointed with the likeness and inconsistent lighting of my initial sketch. You can see the old sketches here and here
Nick Cave, the singer/songwriter from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (also from The Boys next door, The Birthday Party and more recently, Grinderman). I've been a big fan of his work for a while, and his music was on high rotation while painting this.
I consider this more of a stylised portrait rather than a caricature. Below are some of the early rough stages leading up to the finished painting. The challenge was to try and keep some of the spontaneity of the rough and not over render the final too much. Mainly done in Photoshop, but I also used a bit of Painter as well.
I've never learnt to paint traditionally. Growing up I was more of a pen and pencil kid (and sometimes pastels), and even to this day I still break out in a cold sweat with brush in hand and a blank canvas.
So when it comes to painting digitally, sometimes I just have to go with what I know. This technique has more in common with using watercolour pencils rather than with paint. For this digital painting I started with a fairly detailed, shaded pencil drawing (see previous post) which had most of the information I needed for lights and darks. I guess a traditionally taught painter would just use this sketch as a guide and paint opaquely over the top, building up tones with the paint (be it traditionally or digitally) but instead I blend the pencil tones into the shaded colour layer, like you would do with watercolour pencils, to end up with a fairly good 'impersonation' of a painting. Below is a timelapse video of it's creation.
I used Photoshop, with the pencils on a multiply layer, colours on another. Once the basic colour shading was achieved, the image was flattened and blended together. It tends to get a bit soft and smudgy at this stage so afterwards I go in and add back some hard shading and some finer details which were lost in the blending stage. The touch up process is probably the closest I get to traditional painting methods, but it only counts for a small part of the overall painting as all the hard work was taken care of in the pencil stage.
This method is pretty similar to my Paperboy tutorial, but with the Painter step now done in Photoshop.
Three caricatures of some Facebook friends. A burlesque dancer from Dr. Sketchy's, an ex-Disney pal (and caricaturist) and lastly an amazing caricaturist from Iraq.
Recently I had the cool task of doing some caricature art for extreme sports legend Travis Pastrana to promote his Nascar racing debut in 2011. The art became part of a wraparound decal for one of the cars which raced on Saturday, November 13th 2010 at the Phoenix International Raceway. You can visit the official site here and watch video of the car taken for a spin by the man himself.
Below are some roughs I started with and also the final pencils which went through a few major tweaks.
Here's a mockup of the completed car design.
Some photos from the official launch.
Update 15th November- Race results are in...the car crashed! It was a rear collision so none of my artwork was injured...oh, and the driver was okay too. ;)
It's been a while since I've drawn caricatures for fun. I still enjoy it, but as you know I like to explore all different genres in my art so sometimes one thing can get put on the back burner for a spell. But I'm getting back into it, slowly but surely...
