There are three essential elements that transcend style and medium and must be present in a caricature:

  • Likeness- If you can’t tell who it is supposed to be, then it is not successful. All good caricatures incorporate a good likeness of their subjects.
  • Exaggeration- Without some form of exaggeration, or a departure from the exact representation of the subject’s features, all you have is a portrait. The level of exaggeration can vary wildly, but there must be some departure. A straight portrait is not a caricature.
  • Statement- I believe a caricature must editorialize in some way. The artist must be trying to say something about the subject. It might be something to do with the situation the subject is drawn in, it may just be a play on their personality through expression or body language, it might be a simple as making visual fun of some aspect of their persona or image. Exaggeration itself can accomplish this in some cases. The best caricatures say something more about the subject than that they have a big nose.

A successful caricature therefore looks like the subject, is exaggerated to varying degrees and also has something to say about the subject… some sort of editorial comment.

Drawing caricatures is a lot more about seeing what makes the person in front of you unique and personal interpretation than it is about making good, confident marks on the paper.

It’s the manipulation of the RELATIONSHIP of these five simple shapes that create the foundation for your caricature. In fact, I’d argue that 90% of the entire caricature resides in how you relate these five simple shapes to one another. It is the foundation upon which the rest of your building is built, where the real power of exaggeration is realized. Make it good and almost all the heavy lifting is done, the rest merely referring to details. What do I mean by “relationships”? I mean the distances between the five shapes, their size relative to one another, and the angles they are at in relationship to the center axis of the face. Distance. Size. Angle.

In traditional portraiture, the head is divided into “classic proportions”, meaning the relationship of the features are within a certain, accepted range of distance to one another, size and angle relative to the face and head shape. You achieve your likeness in a classic portrait, in it’s most basic form, by correctly drawing the shapes and then the details of each feature according to the model in front of you while staying within the framework of the “classic” proportions. Of course each face varies minutely here and there, but still you do not stray far from the classic formula. In a caricature, like a portrait, the likeness is also achieved by drawing the features as they really look… but you change the relationship of the features based on your perceptions of the face. The relationships you change are as I listed before: distance, size and angle.