A Potpourri of Friends
Many friends on Phuket and in New Zealand are captured in these caricatures. The main picture is of John Underwood, a friend and creative genius who lives on Phuket. The caricature is painted on an old fridge door as part of an exhibition his son, Zac, organised.
Many of the others are friends or just people I was introduced to who liked the idea of seeing a distorted picture of their face. All are volunteers with egos, it appears. Some people’s faces are more straightforward to draw than others. Older men are the best with their creases and lines and crooked smiles. Young women are more challenging; their smoother features, harder to emphasise.
Drawing faces introduces the artist to a different dimension of people. You look for the prominent features: the nose, the eyes, the lips, the teeth, the hair. Then the shape of the face, the size of the ears and the lines; around the eyes, the mouth, across the forehead. The challenge is to pick the right features to exaggerate and still keep the picture in proportion.
To me, the most crucial feature on a face is the mouth.
If the grim smile, the happy grin or the full-on toothy laugh and grin are not drawn correctly, the whole complexion of the drawing loses its shape. The eyes are next. It is astounding how people’s eyes are different. Some are mere slits, others huge Marty Feldman types and yet others peering out from folds of skin.
Even the eyebrows can change the makeup of a face; womens’ with their painted on arches reaching halfway up the forehead; and men with bushes of hair hanging like verandahs down over hooded eyes. All great stuff to a caricaturist.
Women’s faces are the hardest to draw.
They lack the lines and folds that give many men, usually of a certain age, so much more character. The saving grace for women is their hair. Again, it is remarkable how many women, particularly those in the entertainment or television news business, try to hide at least one eyebrow from view with a long lank of hair brushed pretentiously over the forehead and eyebrow, thinking this somehow makes them look sexy. Actually, on some women, it works.
The best women to draw are of a certain age with enough crows feet to cement her role as a person growing old gracefully, you know, like Maggie Smith (wrinkles personified).
