The Artist Speaks!
Article Transcript
I find that drawing digitally is not that different than drawing from life. There are only about 20 to 30 shapes, sizes and arrangements to remember to have enough details to draw a decent caricature, and that principle is true for me in either medium.
When artists who are just starting out ask how long it takes before caricatures get easier, I quip, “Just, I dunno, 50,000 caricatures.” I might as well be saying, “never.” There is always more to learn. For me, it took about 5 years of drawing caricatures full-time before I even understood the significance and freedom of moving a face’s features around, as opposed to the more conservative approach I’d learned from portraiture.
Here is a video showing how I draw a face digitally. In it I share my thought process of how I approach a drawing.
After I finished the video above, I drew the guy again, but this time completely from memory, without the photo and without looking at my sketch...
Dave Stephens has been a professional artist for nearly 30 years. He worked as an animator for Marvel Production’s Saturday morning cartoon Attack of the Killer Tomatoes before he branched out on his own to do commercial art and event entertainment. In addition to being an ISCA member, he is also a member of the National Cartoonist Society’s Southern California branch.
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