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Moving on through celebrity caricatures, we're going to try Justin Bieber now. I've never
seriously looked at a picture of him in my life, I swear to God. So the first thing I
noticed is that his face is a little bit elongated. That shows a photo of him where he's got some
of his hair off his forehead so that I could actually see the shape of his forehead. And
there's an edge from the outsides of his eye sockets down to his chin. I noticed there's
an edge right there that I'm going to play up.
You might notice I'm drawing with the pencil held sideways in my hand. It makes it harder
to draw little tiny lines, so I don't get as hung up on details. It just helps me block
in simple shapes.
His nose sits very high on his face and is very, almost like pixie-ish. Probably that's
his unique facial structure, but it's also just that he's young and people's noses tend
to point upward when they're younger and start pointing downward as they get older.
His mouth sits high, but his top lip is very full, almost like a bow, kind of feminine,
no offense to him. He's got a real pouty thing going on.
So even though those features are soft, there is a certain angular quality to them I'm trying
to capture. I'm just going to start roofing in the outlines, but as I'm drawing the outlines
of his face, I'm thinking all the time about where I think the edges of his skull are and
where the landmarks of his skull are, that help me figure out the construction of his
face. So even though I'm drawing his face just from one angle, I'm thinking of it in
three dimensions. So in my head I'm building a three-dimensional object, even though I'm
drawing a two-dimensional drawing. That's a very important thing, is to really think,
all the way around what you're drawing and imagine the entire structure of it.
Even though his forehead is covered up mostly with hair, I took the time to construct where
I think the lines of his skull are rather than just stop drawing at his hair and just
fill that space up with hair. I'm going to really try to lay off the construction lines
around his eyes because that will really age him.
Even though I'm thinking about the construction of his face, I'm thinking about where his
eye sockets are and how his eyes fit into his eye sockets, I'm going to let those largely
be invisible in the final drawing because it just wouldn't look like him, because he's
young and he doesn't have those landmarks. Those aren't very prominent.
So that's the beginnings of it. The next step would be to bring it into a light box, throw
a piece of tracing paper over it, and start to refine the drawing more. If I'm doing a
caricature, I might do 10 of these to really make sure that I have a firm handle on what
I want to convey about that person's face and personality.
Just as I'm looking at it now, I notice that he actually smirks when he smiles, like this
corner of his mouth actually goes up a little higher than the other corner. So on the next
stage of this drawing, when I'm tracing it onto a new piece of paper, I would address
that.
That's the basic structure of a caricature of Justin Bieber.