fanart rambling...

[ratcreature]

When I was drawing my latest piece, i.e. the SGA/Avatar fusion with Teyla as Waterbender, I was reminded again why I'm rather reluctant to try drawing fanart for tv/movie fandoms, my recent forays into SGA notwithstanding: I have a hard time with character-likeness if the character has to look like a real person.

Because my style of drawing is more comic/illustration-like than truly realist, e.g. that I like to have lineart, it needs a certain amount of simplification in facial features. Which then presents the problem of how to get there from the starting point of a realistic and fully rendered face. (Not that I can do realistic portraits, but in theory I mean.)

The first thing that usually comes to mind for trying to get a handle on how a character looks is to start with a photo of the character's actor or a screenshot of the character, and then somehow simplify from there. The reasoning is that after all basing your art on a decent photo works well enough for realistic character portraits in fanart, which are often recognizably based on promo pics and such. Yet this approach is somewhat hazardous as anyone who has seen a bad tv comic, one where the artist visibly just traced screenshots, can attest to. It's the phenomenon that in its extreme is lineart that you could even actually map over a screenshot and the lines "fit," yet if you look at the lineart alone it doesn't really look like the character at all.

The problem is of course in the nature of lineart. If you have ever tried to trace a photo, you've run into the problem that there aren't really any "lines", so usually you tend pick mostly the "high contrast borders" with a bit of abstract knowledge of how the form of the thing is thrown in. And this works okay if you have say the contrast of a leg against a bright background, but much less for things like facial features. And it is not merely distortions due to a specific photo, i.e. that depending on the light and angle your best guess for lines may not emphasize the really prominent features, but put stress on the wrong parts. It's that any reduction of photos to lines with a face makes it a caricature, even if you don't add intentional "distortions," simply because having just one line where there used to be color gradients introduces emphasis, and likeness decreases if you put that emphasis "wrong", i.e. not on the recognizable, outstanding features.

In theory this is not much of a problem, after all the goal all along is to draw the character, not to trace photos, and you just have to adjust your degree of caricature to compensate for the reduction of rendering, that is to figure out which facial features of said person deviate from the average proportion, the mean of facial features in a way, and exaggerate. I've read that even computers can do this with algorithms based on photos and make caricatures of people.

The problem I'm having is that so many actors are pretty people. See, I'm not that good with faces. It's one thing to spot how someone differs from "average" if they have huge ears (think all the Prince Charles caricatures), or a big nose, or a very distinct skull shape, but humans tend to find regular, even features more attractive, so tv characters are hard to figure out. It's not that there are no differences, obviously I recognize these people when I see them (well for the most part anyway, like I said, I'm not that good at memorizing faces), but I have no idea which features are the ones standing out most to me on a conscious level with faces like that.

I think it would be really cool if one of those caricature algorithms was made into a webtoy somewhere, and I could just give it a photo and it would warp the features to point out how it differs from the average face. Then, even though my style doesn't need outright caricature, I could use those hints for more subtle exaggeration suited for my purposes.

I guess I just wish some technology could help make up for my lack of talent/practice in character portrayal/caricature. *sigh*

Comments

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

I don't know how helpful this is, but I read something once about how sometimes it's useful to practice drawing caricatures by drawing people who already have sort of "exaggerated" features? Like Angelina Jolie or Arnold Schwarzenegger? Plus then, I guess, it would be easier to find other caricatures to compare your own efforts to.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, practice always helps. My main problem is that I'm lazy, and I don't think I could motivate myself into "training drawings" of people I'm not interested in just to get better at something. I'm not that disciplined that I would do exercises that aren't somehow fun for me in themselves. And as bad as I know it is for improvement not to draw and practice all the time, I'm not actually one of the people who constantly feels the urge to draw and sketch to get proficient. I just don't have that kind of drive. I never managed to stick with jogging either... *g*

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

I've actually noticed that with TV-pretty people, the likenesses that look the best to me are very generic and more of a general "pretty" face than a detailed caricature of the actual person -- much like superhero comics, where most of the characters are essentially the same face with different hair and clothes. For example, if you look at pentapus's art, her likenesses of the characters' faces are VERY cute, cartoony and self-similar, but they look great (at least, I think so) and you can easily tell who's who. The generic faces are actually more effective because you don't really get hung up on the little details of the features that you wouldn't notice on the show itself; it's easier to focus on the big cues that identify the characters (John's black clothes, Ronon's dreads).

I'm not saying it's a fantastic way to draw in general, but for getting TV character likenesses, it's actually very effective to draw a general "pretty" face and surround it with the character's usual trappings. As long as nothing is blatantly WRONG -- for example, John's face is kind of pointy, and a square lantern jaw would look out of place, but pretty much any narrow anime-style face looks more or less like him.

Edit: Which, come to think of it, is actually a feature of caricatures in general. You don't caricature everything on their face and body -- you do a generic face/body with exaggerations of the two or three features that are most distinctive, whether it's their hands, their nose or their hair. A totally generic face with very distinctive hair is still a caricature if there's nothing striking about the original person's face.

[ratcreature]

While I'm actually not all that enthused about the "generic face" thing in superhero comics, I do a similar approach as well, where you have more code trappings than actual facial features. Certainly the JOhn in my Steampunk picture is rather generic with hair. You have a problem though if you want to draw the characters without their props. I mean, if I had gone for drawing John as airbender I'd have probably still drawn him with hair (at least there weres ome instances Aang disguised himself with such as well iirc, so I could probably justify it somehow), but obviously if I wanted to realyl draw John as Avatar, I'd have to draw him bald and still make it look like John Sheppard, and then you have a problem if you rely too much on such symbols in lieu of actual resemblance.

[gnatkip.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. I'm having the same problem right now, trying to draw TV characters. In my current version, their little faces are just... they're just wrong and creepy. I think it's the "uncanny valley" thing, where they're too realistic to be cartoony, but too cartoony to be realistic. Bleh.

"I've read that even computers can do this with algorithms based on photos and make caricatures of people." Really?! How cool!

[ratcreature]

TV characters are just hard in a style that's neither realistic nor a complete cartoon like chibis (or even things like my ratcreature icon versions, I mean, I'd like to think that thanks to costuming, props and hair you can easily guess as which character my avatar is dressed up as, even though it is a non-human big-nosed monster with weird ears, large feet and a tail).

But yeah, I've read about the caricature programs on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caricature#Computerized_caricature_and_formal_definition_of_caricature