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

Comments

[sholio]

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.