Now that you’ve got this far in my series on mastering the art of caricature, I thought I’d show you how to put together all of the steps I have set out so far. To help you do this, I’m going to talk you through the process I used to create this David Bowie painting. And as I haven’t previously touched on the use of colour in caricature, this is also a good opportunity to deal with that. So, in the words of the man himself…let’s dance.
The first stage of the painting was to gather the reference photos. There are decades of great, well-lit images of Bowie, both on stage and in studio settings. He was always an interesting-looking guy, but I decided to focus on images of him in the somewhat later stages of his career. This was when he really had some character etched on his face.
After I gathered these reference materials, I picked up a pencil. Here’s one page of sketches that I made, based on my photo selection…
You’ll notice the pencil drawings are very rough. Although I’m showing them to you here, there was no concern at the time I drew them that they would necessarily see the light of day, so I had no compunction about scribbling as loosely as I wished. Every time I drew him from a different perspective, I learned something new about the facial structure.
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