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

[liviapenn]

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*

[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

[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]

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