The Art of Cheating At Caricature

Really too tired tonight to make this a polished blog post full of clean prose. Besides, the following was an experiment; the kind of dumb exercise I often find myself attempting over a bank holiday weekend.

It began on Saturday afternoon. I'd been browsing the web and I followed a link that took me to the webpage of a fairly well-known illustrator. I had a look through his celebrated caricatures, which were all truly brilliant, yet I'd also noticed something strange about them. I though I recognised a few of the faces.

Now, that shouldn't be odd. He was drawing famous people so I would obviously know the faces. Yet it's wasn't that I knew the faces as much as I recognised the faces as they'd been originally photographed. A few minutes of googling later and I'd confirmed my suspicion. They might have been pulled and squeezed a little but they were exactly the same as the original photos. I was pretty sure that the bugger cheats!*

I couldn't be certain, of course,  and I'm still not certain. However, having spent a little time looking into the work of other digital caricaturists, I realised that cheating might not be as uncommon as I first suspected. There are dozens of the little buggers out there making a nice little fortune by using this technique. I therefore set myself a challenge. Not having done anything like this before, I set out to cheat.

I began by spending Saturday afternoon painting a caricature of Michael Gove. After a couple of hours, I had this... And believe me when I say that I hand painted every single detail. Click the image to see it bigger. You can see my brush stokes and the places I missed.



Now, I didn't have time to finish the tie and, frankly, wasn't sure what to do with it at this point. So I thought I'd try another, this time of Syria's Assad, which I finished sitting in a hospital cafe this morning. Yes, it really is that basic a technique. There's really no skill involved. With the Assad picture, I was much less careful about colouring in the patches. I rushed it with no concern for the 'art'. I just wanted to test the method. This is the result:



Normally I don't really care too much about using technology to help the process of creating something. I use spell checkers when writing and (much to the disgust of Stu), I use tippex when drawing cartoons in ink. Yet these two paintings genuinely make me feel so ashamed that I haven't (and won't) even bother signing them.

But let me explain the method, though it's so obvious and straightforward that you've probably figured it out already. I found two high quality images on the web and loaded them into Photoshop. I then applied the Liquify filter and followed the usual rules of caricature to distort the faces. In the case of the second, I then created a standard mock up of Assad with a noose around his neck and lifted the hand from Austin Powers (no more than ten minutes work). I then load it into a painting program and use the colour picker to pick the colour of an area which I then painted over with not much care. Rinse and repeat for a couple of hours and bingo. You get results like the above. In the case of the Assad, I used a blending tool to smooth out the patches. I also added the background myself after the original proved too difficult to copy. It accounts for the fact that it's the most amateur bit of the painting.

Now, some people would say this isn't cheating but I beg to differ. Is my effort of a few hours that much different to my simply applying a Photoshop paint-effect filter to my original composition which took about ten seconds?

Yet I guess people will say that I'm being harsh and perhaps I am. A few of the people who I suspect of using this technique do so as a start and their finished results can look spectacular to the point that they can take your breath away. And perhaps that's all that matters. Teller & Penn (the director should get the first credit, I think) made a brilliant documentary last year called 'Tim's Vermeer' which detailed how a non-artist could create 'great art' using a relatively simply mechanical process. Do people say Vermeer was any less talented an artist simply because he copied directly from nature?

Having said that, I personally don't like it. I know I could improve the technique if I invested more time into it. I could adapt it to produce more 'painterly' or stylized effects. Yet I can't help but feel that whilst they look impressive, they're somehow hollow once you know how they're done. In future, I think I'll stick to drawing my caricatures the way I've been learning for the past few years. I'd rather fail trying to learn the techniques of Gerald Scarfe or Al Hirschfeld than succeed by turning myself into a copying machine. I prefer my results won by hard work, trial and error, and plenty of mistakes. I just know that the next time I see one of those amazing caricatures you often see on the cover of magazine and newspapers, I'll be a little more suspicious about how they came into existence.

* 'Cheating' is, I know, a strong word. Perhaps you feel like it's also the wrong word but, for me, I think it's correct. Unless you admit to painting over a photograph, you are giving people the belief that you've achieved your results through your own skills. That's not to say none of the finished product is without skill but the 'likeness' is the caricaturist's most prized 'skill'. Getting a likeness is the hardest part of the artist's craft, especially when  pulling the face into contorted shapes. Gerald Scarfe is a genius because he can do that more than any other artist. If you're achieving the same through a mechanical process,** then I think it's correct to call it 'cheating'. If you're not cheating but producing amazing results, then congratulations: you really are a true artist.

** Of course, there's a second question. What constitutes a mechanical process? Does beginning with a grid count as mechanical? Well, I guess it does but this is about scale. All art is (or should be) about the craft and a craft is a mechanical process. A grid can still go wrong. It takes skill to make it work. Even a lightbox takes some effort to produce reasonable results. However, simply painting over a painting, using a colour picker to ensure exact colours is something else entirely. A machine could do it and often does it when applying filter effects. The only difference between that and a person doing it is that the human brings a degree of incompetence to the copying,  producing a more random effect, which makes it look hand drawn. It's our human inexactitude that makes the deception all the greater.

A Brief Aside About Gerald Scarfe

In his books, Gerald Scarfe draws grotesquely turgid masterpieces of scatological detail. It's something you tend to forget if you take in his work via the pages of The Sunday Times or (as is my preferred option) via his weekly email. I'm not saying that they've become 'safe' but the last cartoon of his to really cause a real stink was, I believe, his picture of Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall in which Palestinians were trapped in blood-coloured cement. There's an excellent article about the cartoon here but I think it's correct to argue that the affront taken by many had nothing to do with the content of the cartoon. People were simply offended because he hadn't taken the side of Israel's Prime Minister. They were more offended by his politics than they really were by the content of the cartoon. Before that, Scarfe's previous 'outrage' might have been his draw of Prince Charles as Camilla's tampon, which is more in his usual line of sending his subjects to the arse end of humiliation.

The irony not lost to Scarfe fans is that neither are examples of his 'brutal' best. Thumb through any of his collections and you'll quickly find drawings that are more savage. Nixon, Heath, Thatcher, Blair: he attacked those four targets with particular relish and you can usually tell when Scarfe has a particular axe to grind. He learns to draw a face in shorthand form. The most obvious example is Nixon. Scarfe's Nixon drawings quickly move away from simple representation. He deconstructs (a bit of a plodding word but useful here) the faces, reducing features to their most code-like form. Nixon became drooping jowls. Heath was a long nose tapering out to nothing. Thatcher was an arcing nose and rat-like teeth. Blair was soon just the teeth and mad eyes. In comparison, he treats Netanyahu to a fairly standard caricature.

I can't help but find the difference between caricature and some kind of formal shorthand one of the most interesting areas of the subject of caricature. Not all caricaturists do it or are probably capable of doing it. If caricature is the subject of a degree course then what Scarfe does is really a doctoral study in advanced facial reductionism.

Reducing political figures to shapes is one act of brilliance but what I admire the most is his ability to reduce them to down to their sheer animalism. One of my favourite Scarfe drawings is his picture of Margaret Thatcher shitting out the remains of Ted Heath who sits on the floor, his pinched face reduced to a newly squeezed lump.



I wonder if Scarfe ever drew a character more in love with shitting than he did Thatcher, who can also be seen shitting out a brown mess that's the shape of modern Britain.



That one picture alone is the best summation of the last half century of British history since nearly all Tories are essentially Thatcherite Tories. They aren't Tories of the pre-Thatcher era. They aren't even conservatives in the traditional sense of being conservative. True conservatives hate ideology whereas the modern Conservative Party is obsessed by ideology and by the Thatcherite ideology in particular, that reduces the rest of us to barely thinking animals born to service a few with the balls to risk all, gamble high, and become supremely powerful.

As far as I know, there's no single volume collecting all of Scarfe's Thatcher-era cartoons, though I'd be the first in the queue to buy one if there was. In the meantime, I have a few examples to study and pour over. If I could get a fraction of Scarfe's anger into my own cartoons, I can't help but think they'd be better for it.

 

What Exactly Does Phillip Schofield Do?

The only thing worse than struggling to draw a person's likeness is struggling to draw the likeness of a person who you consider embodies the great moronic zeitgeist. Last night it took me many merciless hours to draw Phillip Schofield and even then the result was barely recognisable and left my jaw aching and teeth sore. I was tempted not to post it today but I've set myself a challenge to post a caricature a day for as long as I can last. So there it is, in its lousy glory, sitting at the head of this 900 word rant.

It all began yesterday afternoon with a Twitter message that had made me scream something obscene at my monitor. Twitter has a habit of sending emails which begin 'Do you know...' They rarely list people I actually know. Most of the time they ask things like 'Do you know Barak Obama, Stephen Fry, and The Pope'. Of course I know *of* Barak Obama, Stephen Fry, and The Pope but I don't personally know them. I mean: one of them is the bloody Pope and another is Stephen Fry!

Twitter has this miserable habit of blurring the lines between social media and world news. It wants to connect you to the same circuit as all the important people but that only emphasises how insignificant you truly are. Yet even more annoying than the 'Do you know The Pope' emails are those emails which ask me if I know some toadying little fluffer from the arse end of UK TV. If somebody asked me if I wanted to meet the Pope, I'd obvious say 'yes'. Who wouldn't want to meet the Pope? Asking me to follow the Pope therefore makes some sense. However, that doesn't mean that I'd cross the road to sneeze over Richard P. Bacon's loafers.

Yesterday the email began 'Some people you may know on Twitter' and it listed Phillip Schofield, Jason Bradbury and Keith Chegwin. Now, if I'd held a black mass and some portal to hell had opened up beneath my desk, I couldn't have feared a greater triumvirate of evil popping over from the dark side. I would really struggle to list three people who I'd be less likely to follow. I mean: what exactly do these people do?

One of my biggest irritations in life is cabling. I hate cables. I hate the amount of cables that are behind the TV, running along every wall. I hate network cables, power cables, HDMI cables, optical cables, and every other cable that makes my life a misery. I accept cables are necessary evil for all the technology I enjoy but I don't like them.

And I feel exactly the same way about TV presenters. Presenters are the bits of mumbling flesh who connect more important bits of TV together.

Now, I appreciate that some presenters are better than others like I accept that some cables are quality cables. There are cables which are gold plated, multi-stranded and six meters long. Yet I never make a point of giving a visitor a tour of the house's best bits of cabling. By the same logic, I don't believe that presenters are anything special. I firmly believe that if the BBC scrapped the millions they waste on so called 'celebrity presenters' and paid them normal journalist wages, we wouldn't notice any difference in the quality of the links between items of real importance. It's the same when you go into a specialist electronics shop and see that they want to charge you £40 for a one metre HDMI cable. Because the signal is digital, it won't work any better than the HDMI cable you'd buy for £2 on eBay. Digital means that it either works or it doesn't work. You don't get a slightly better quality of '1's or '0's by buying the more expensive cable.

By the same logic, you don't get better 'in between bits' by paying Claudia Winkleman the £250,000 that the BBC reportedly pay her each year to host Strictly Come Dancing. She doesn't even dance.

I hate to disparage an entire industry of 'professionals' but, on the whole, presenters do nothing. Their only skill is a skill that is innate in all people. It is to possess 'personality'. Of course, some people would argue that these presenters have distinct personalities that make them unique and entertaining. Yet 'personality' is hardly so unique that spewing banalities like a WInkleman should be worth a quarter of a million pounds out of the license fee.

I also accept that some personalities aren't suited to TV. Make me the host of 'This Morning' and I'd alienate the audience inside seconds with my dark humour and uncompromising attitude toward the trivial. There'd be a national scandal within the first fifteen minutes and emergency questions to the Prime Minister within the hour. And I suppose that is what it comes down to. These people are paid so much because they're the blandest among us. Yet that doesn't seem right.

Schofield currently has 3,294,628 followers on Twitter. That's about 3,294,616 more disciples than Jesus. People follow him because he's nothing special. He's just bland, inoffensive, and (importantly) on TV. He now has a separate Twitter account on which he talks about wine and food, which is about as far from his beginnings, sitting with a sodding chipmonk on his shoulder hosting children's programmes on BBC1.

Meanwhile I sit here with a huge chip on my shoulder, waiting for the next message from Twitter. I'm eager to learn what evil I'll be drawing tonight and posting here tomorrow. I'll be happy so long as it isn't Claudia Winkleman...

Bill O'Reilly Doodled Badly

This is throwaway stuff. Caricatures are fun to draw, though I draw them simply in order to learn how to draw them. I have no idea why I drew Bill O'Reilly. I don't watch Fox News and I don't watch his show. However, I like finding faces I've not drawn before, so last night, I sat down and drew his face. Then, not quite knowing what to do, I took my usual step when bored and stuck the head on a naked body wearing a g-string. Childish stuff, I know, but I was bored, too tired to think but not quite tired enough to sleep. I also believe in the old dictum that the best way to take away a person's powerful mojo is to picture them naked. Nothing ridicules a person more than stripping them of all pretence.

I have two stages when I draw these caricatures. Stage one is actually trying to get a likeness and it can take anywhere between two minutes and two (even several) hours. Because I don't have an artistic bone in my body and I can't draw to save my life, I have to work hard to get past stage one. Sometimes I really struggle with a face. Prince Andrew is a swine to draw. Nick Clegg is getting better. I like drawing Stephen Fry. I hate drawing Tom Cruise. Other times, the face is immediately there. Some faces lend themselves to caricature and a 'likeness' is never too hard to find. Other faces, just never quite work. This Bill O'Reilly worked fairly quickly, though I think I lost a little something during stage two. Stage two is the bit I enjoy. It's when I clean up all the lines, adding shading, and then (if I'm in the mood) putting in the colour.

Today I'll be hard at work going through computer code. I'm trying to get at least one of my two current projects finished so I can at least put it out into the world and I can forget it and move on to something new.

William Hague Denies UK Torture

Sunday's cartoon. Regretted starting the crosshatching about five minutes...

Francois Hollande

 

If I have any regular readers left since my slight break over November and Christmas, you'll know that I'm trying to draw one caricature a day. If I had any hope of keeping this going, I'd call it my 'Draw One Caricature a Day for a Year Project' but I doubt I'll last the month. Not every day throws up a good face to draw and I often don't have time to come up with a gag. These are just exercises in making myself draw every day and draw the one thing I find hardest to draw, which is the likenessES of famous people. So, here is Day 10's effort, drawn very late at night when I was already tired after drawing this month's strip for the Liverpool fanzine, 'Red All Over The Land'.

January 3rd: Nick Griffin

1st January: Piers Morgan

My New Year resolution is to draw more caricatures, so I've set myself the target of drawing at least one a day, usually last thing at night. Since I'm drawing these when I'm usually falling asleep in front of the TV, I have to draw them very quickly before unconsciousness falls. That means they'll be noticeably rough, sometimes unfinished, and if I'm going to be honest about posting the actual results of each day's effort, sometimes barely sketched, ugly, and even monstrous. This is more of an intellectual exercise I'm setting myself but I think the results should be amusing, even if that means amusing in a bad way.

The result of day one is my version of Piers Morgan facing Brett Lee in the Melbourne nets. I couldn't draw broken ribs so I did the next best thing. Having watched the over, I'm surprised he got away with broken ribs.

Political Cartoonists on 'The One Show'

It's rare that I post things taken from TV but I thought this feature on political cartooning worth recording for posterity. It includes some good clips of Martin Rowson at his grouchiest best, though how Nadine Dorries managed to get involved I'm really not sure.

George Osborne takes to Twitter!

The Jimmy Carr Cartoon

I said I might stick my caricature up here so here it is in it's inept glory.

It doesn’t surprise me that Jimmy Carr’s been avoiding paying tax and in many ways I don’t blame him. I tend to think that governments always find more imaginative ways of wasting money. Yet what astonishes me about wealth is that few people seem to reach a point at which they no longer think it necessary to dodge the taxman. Would I be any different had I earned £3.3 million in a year? Until it happens, I suppose I don’t have the right to judge. I would hope, however, that I would only be too pleased to pay tax, realising that to earn even a hundredth of that would make me deliriously happy.

Yet if I can’t judge the man’s actions according to my own moral compass, I can judge the man and his material. To say he’s one of my least favourite comedians is to over simplify my attitude towards Carr, a gifted comedian with a sharp wit who seems genuinely interested in the theory of comedy if we are to judge from the book he co-authored a year or so ago. However, there is also a deeply repellent side to his humour which values jokes at the expense of the weak and vulnerable. Comedy is a powerful force when directed at the rich and powerful. Directed towards others, it has a blunt force that does nothing but harm. It’s a point that Steve Coogan has previously made in reference to 'Top Gear' but I’d say that it equally applies to Carr. And Carr does certainly hurt, even if he does it with a certain lopsided smirk as if to highlight that his postmodern irony is irony at its most ironic.

Bad taste jokes are usually funny and, for that reason, they are an easy crowd pleaser. To tell them on stage, prefacing the jokes with warnings, doesn’t make the telling of them any less cheap, snide, or immoral. And by the same score: cheating the taxman in legal ways does not make it easy to condone. He cheats the taxman and though his lopsided grin reminds us that it’s all done legally, it shouldn’t be a surprise. His comedy has always been at our expense and we have paid him handsomely to now mock us with his off shore bank accounts. None of this surprises me and all of it reminds me why I watch so little British comedy.

Tonight, I'm going to give 'Wilfred' a try. It's am American comedy based on an Australian show, about a man's relationship with a neighbour's dog, who only he sees as a man in a dog suit. How I missed this when it was shown on the BBC, I don't know but I have high hopes for it. It's a grown mad in a dog suit! How can it not be funny? Right?