There are such subtle nuances that affect what we see. Such subtle nuances that affect a person's mood. Personality. So when we draw Caricatures, the result iS affected by so many choices along the way.

This isn't such a concern when we're drawing Party Caricatures. No time to study a person's whole personality. And no time to try out different lines. It's all just fun. We're all in the Party Zone.

But when making a Studio Caricature.... the choices become more critical. There's time to choose what we want to Caricature to be saying. Personality. We get subtle changes from each line ~ thicker? thinner? softer? harder? angular? curved? exactly where would that curve go?

Several years ago, I felt honored to draw the two Dentists from Preserve Your Teeth. They are quite respected among the Best Dentists around. (If you need dental help, I recommend that you email them to see what can be done: ESinfo@preserveyourteeth.com ).

These two Dentists are married to each other, and they work in the same office. Dr Urbankova, the one with the 'braid' does the general dentistry. Dr Engebretsen, represented here as the 'floating mask in the sky', does periodontics.

Very pleased with their pictures, but only the picture of the Dentist with the braid got framed and hung up. Because they wanted them both to be the Same Size. (I had drawn the picture Dr Urbankova on 8.5 x 11 paper. I had drawn the picture of Dr Engebretsen on 11 x 17 paper. So now they requested that I redraw the picture of the Dr Engebretsen onto 8.5" x 11" paper.

I did that:

Then I was imagining what it would look like in the Dentist Office. Both fine Carictures, but do they Match? When the pictures are hanging together? So I started playing around with making a full-face picture of Dr Engebretsen.

Nice. I gave them Both the new floating mask picture And the picture with the cap. But what I'm writing about in this post is the Subtle Nuances of drawing the Caricature. Here's a picture of what I went through before I settled on that excellent Full Face picture of Dr Engebretsen.

You can notice the subtle changes of things like:

even though I represented his 'Mouth' as a single line, where to bend it? Changes the expression.

and even though I chose 'Short Hair' to be indicated near the 'Baseball Cap', what type of line to use??

and I felt like the heart-shaped 'Adams Apple', although cute, was not a good idea in this case......

Just relaxing. I watched a pleasant movie called 'Milton's Secret'.

Pen moving. I drew the main character. Interesting face

Had a few minutes before going in to the Bat Mitzvah yesterday, so I went back to practicing Tame Caricatures. Each of my approaches feels different than another approach. I finally discovered how to switch easily from Tame Caricatures to Cartoony Caricatures. And I realized that my best choice for Speed and Quality would be to:

Draw Individual Females as Tame Caricatures,

Draw Couples and Groups as Cartoony Caricatures,

and Draw Males as Cartoony

Using very little, if any, predraw (perhaps just size or placement), I approached the Tame Caricatures with Outside-In in my mind even though I frequently drew the Inside before the Outside. And using very little, if any, predraw (perhaps just size or placement), I approached the Cartoony Caricatures however it hit me ~ usually like yes yay also Outside-In.

It's time to get myself in gear. I will have to draw Fast at tomorrow's Event. Huge place with thousands of people. I can't be trying to redevelop myself. I won't have time to reinvent the wheel.

So it's back to the way I have been successfully drawing at Events already. And we'll see if my recent Cartoony studies might affect some of them.

To warm up, I redrew a few of the Caricatures that I previously drew at Events. And I even looked up The Dark Knight online ~ Not that I would ever use a different artist's character at an event ~ but I felt like I should familiarize myself with him. Because of some of the things that I had been told about tomorrow's event.

Note: as always, if I draw more than one face in a Caricature, it doesn't necessarily mean that the people know each other. I pick them at random.