Monday, May 4, 2015

On-the-Spot Humorous Illustration


I like trying out new ideas when I'm drawing on location. One approach that I tried many years ago is the on-the-spot character study.

For this one, I was sitting in a barber shop while a customer was getting a haircut. 

I told them what I was doing, and they didn't pay much attention to me after that. I used whatever elements of the scene helped to support the story, such as those odd head forms mounted on the barber chairs. 


The customer didn't have a mop of hair and beard like that. I kind of made that up, and I exaggerated the barber, too. But I used real details from the scene, like the comb in the barber's back pocket.

I drew the picture with a brush and India ink over a pencil underdrawing, about 11 x 14 inches. I was inspired by the caricature illustration of Al Dorne, Norman Rockwell, and Mort Drucker. 

Further reading
I intended this sketch for The Artist's Guide to Sketching, but it never made it into the book. A book that inspired this thinking is Humorous Illustration by Nick Meglin. Also, check out the more recent books: MAD's Greatest Artists: Mort Drucker: Five Decades of His Finest Works and Albert Dorne: Master Illustrator

9 comments:

  1. This looks really great and with that style.. It is sad that it didn't make it to the book. ( off - topic )However, James, which video from your «in the wild» section will be first? Casein or Gouache? Will there be a topic about portraits? And will there be the special weeks, such as watercolour week? Thank you and sorry.

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  2. HNK, thanks for asking. "Gouache in the Wild" will be next. It's about 85% done, and I'm really excited about it. Right now I've got seven different painting adventures that together will add up to a little over an hour. These are paintings that blog readers haven't seen yet for the most part. I haven't edited the portrait segment yet. And, yes! I plan to do a special week spotlighting each of the segments of the video.

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  3. Didn't know you had such a knack for cartooning. Any other work like this?

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  4. Wow, great work and read my mind. Last week, I was thinking about sketches in a barbershop, hey, it is a great location where you can get a diverse crowd with interesting characters. Monet as a kid would go into barbershop to sketch portraits of people. I am actually a barber myself and I always hoped that someone would come in a create a sketch of me at work.

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  5. Oh, and James, did you know that schmincke has the casein colours? Well, they have a binder to produce it.

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  6. Sure wish "The Artist's Guide to Sketching" could be reissued!

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  7. Thank you for this post. I was drifting away but you pulled me back in.

    I have been fascinated with "cartoon plain air sketching" lately -- for me what that really means is, for the most part, taking note of the objects & characters in the scene, but only as verbal concepts and *not* striving to represent the visual shapes I see before me. I then draw a cartoon of the scene based on the mental model inside my head. I find that tremendously liberating. The struggle to catch fleeting poses is diminished. It's not a way to accurately represent what I see, but gives much more practice in mentally absorbing forms and working from sound construction.

    Would love to see more posts along these lines.

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  8. Hey... I wrote "plein" but it got auto-corrected to "plain". Arg!

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  9. James, I'd love to see this book available for Kindle. Any chance of that happening someday? Cheers.

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