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Caricature drawing with Photoshop CS

by Vincenzo

 

In this caricature drawing with photoshop tutorial I have decided to analyze a very simple technique.

 

It will allow you to draw smashing caricatures in no time given a bit of knowledge of Photoshop CS.

 

So this is not a technical tutorial about photoshop directly but a way of using it to quickly obtain a template to use for your caricature drawing.

 

You will need Photoshop CS (or a version of photoshop Elements) and a bit of confidence using this software to do this tutorial. I am not going to go into the technical details of photoshop. A drawing tablet is also very useful but you can realize it with a mouse as well.

 

Lets' get started!

 

caricature drawing with Photoshop part 1

 

caricature drawing obama

 

I have decided to use Obama for this tutorial because he has a nice smiling face in this picture but you can really use a random picture or a picture of a friend!

 

 

caricature drawing obama warp

 

The first thing you have to do is to create a layer in PS containing just a cut-out of the face of your subject. Reason is you want to apply the warp effect only on the face.

 

caricature drawing obama

 

As you can see here only the face is affected by the transformation. The cut-out doesn't need to be precise. It can in fact be very rough, you'll see soon why. Now on to the tricky part.

 

Let's analyze the face of your subject and see what features are more accentuated. With Obama I can see that he has an elongated face, a big smile and quite a pronounced forehead. He also has slightly large nostrils and a long chin.

 

With this analysis in mind let's go on using the warp tool and tray to accentuate them. Using the warp tool is very easy, you just click and hold inside the grid and pull around to warp. Let's see what I came up with.

 

Caricature drawing with Photoshop Part 2

 

caricature drawing Obama

 

Ok this is roughly what I came up with after a few minutes of pulling and stretching.

The beauty of this technique is that is very hard to warp or deform the face beyond recognition because the warp-mesh links are all interconnected. This means that is very easy to come up with a reasonable result even if you are still not experienced in "seeing" the facial characteristics.

 

I have tried to keep in mind which facial features I wanted to emphasize while I was working on Obama and as you can see I tried to elongate the chin, enlarging the smile even more and a bit the forehead. Nothing too dramatic though. try to see for yourself what I have done to the Mr president.

 

Now that we are happy with this version of Obama, turning it into a drawing is a mere exercise of drawing on it.

 

caricature drawing obama

 

Create a new level on top of the layer that contains the face, change the opacity of it in order to see the caricature face and, preferably with a stylus and a drawing tablet, start tracing the new face. Start with the profile keeping a very loose touch.

 

caricature drawing obama

 

Trace hairs, nose, eyebrows, mouth and teeth.

 

caricature drawing obama

 

get closer to add more details around the eyes and eyebrows but basically we are done!

 

caricature drawing obama

 

This is approximately how your drawing might look like after the treatment!. Neat!

As you can see I have kept the line work really loose but you can get even better results using Illustrator or a free drawing software like Inkscape to work out a sleeker digital inking with a vector based tool.

 

Let's retouch our quick and dirty caricature and see the final result!

 

caricature drawing obama photoshop

 

There you have it! A beautiful caricature of Obama (in this case) done within 30 min! You can now color it, print it and use it as a present, print it on a T-shirt just to name few possibilities!

 

Stay tuned for the next tutorials about caricature drawing, I will certainly examine other (more traditional) techniques in the future updates!

 

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