Cartoonize Yourself

If you want to learn more about how to cartoonize yourself, you have come to the right place! Go ahead and read on! One particular site which you can use to do this is Cartoony.Me!

In learning to do caricatures, a good place for the cartoonist to start is with his own portrait. We know our own faces only too well, having studied them in the mirror each morning. Without advertising the fact, most cartoonists pull an Alfred Hitchcock from time to time, putting themselves into their cartoons when the role calls for such typecasting.

In most cases, a cartoonist would work from a photograph to do a caricature. But a perfectionist might prefer to sketch from life, arguing that a photograph, like a painting, carries its own interpretation. Doing a caricature from a photograph, David Low said, was a little like doing a biography from Who’s Who. Low didn’t even settle for a real-life pose. He used to follow his subjects around to catch them in their unguarded moments.

Rather than work directly from a photograph or even from life, the cartoonist may find that he can produce a better caricature by studying the face for a while, noting the shape of the head, amount of hair, and any outstanding facial features, then drawing from memory. Suck practice may help the cartoonist break away from realistic sketches.

If the cartoonist runs out of faces to caricature, he can turn to a singular volume brought out by Dover Publications in 1967: Dictionary of American Portraits. There he’ll find 4,045 generous-sized mug shots of important Americans, most of them from the last century. A remarkable gallery of facial expressions and features!

The impersonator we saw often on television in the 1970’s, Rich Little, could screw up his face to make it look just like the character he was imitating. More than that, he could sit, stand, and walk like any of his victims. Rich Little had the mannerisms down cold. His Johnny Carson turned around stiffly and always fidgeted with a pencil, his Ed Sullivan humped his shoulders and cracked his knuckles; his Richard Nixon shook his sagging howls and held up his arms in the victory salute.

Similarly, the caricaturist deals with more than just the face. Any oddities or even deformities of figure might appear in the total picture. You know how important such details are. From a half block away you can pick out a friend without seeing his face, you can recognize him by his walk.