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Your 1 January 2005, YouCanDraw.com Communiqué
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Elvis!
My treat: Five Elvis' for the
price of one :-)
Well you know it's been a long time since
I've done much drawing. So I put it to myself to draw for at least half
an hour five nights in a row. And the following is what I came up with.
See, if you just schedule in the time (like just 15 minutes a day or
every other day) the momentum will start to build. And you'll be asking
"why didn't I start that years ago?". I spent the majority of
my time drawing and re-drawing Elvis Presley. And 30 minutes rapidly
turned into 45, 60 and more minutes of pure (though in the beginning
frustrating) enjoyment. -- It was more frustrating in the
beginning. And I only mention this since in the last e-zine I was
talking about how it had 6,7,8 months since I've done any significant
drawing. Let's dive on in...
http://www.facade.com/celebrity/Elvis_Presley/
See original at the link above. (This is
not my own picture of Elvis, i.e. I don't own it so I really shouldn't
keep it here permanently on the site until I get permission from www.Facade.com.)
I flipped this picture around in Photoshop to make it face the same
way the other
pictures face.
OK, what makes Elvis caricaturable?
Let's start from the top down...
The hair:
Big. Huge. Massive, larger than life. All
the superlatives you can conjure up for that top heavy fifties
bow-of-a-ship tough dude frontal assault of a hair doo. Next to Lyle
Lovett and maybe Boxing promoter Don King, Elvis sports third place in
my book for front heavy hair. That's the obvious. What's not so obvious
- and what makes drawing this kind of hair a challenge - is capturing
the 3-d mass of it all. How do you do that? Lot's of contours and
highlights. Now I was pretty lazy with the following examples. Only on
two of the samples below did I even begin to fill in the hair. (Go ahead
and check 'em out.) Watch for how the highlights traverse the separate
locks of hair to form an overall highlight shape.
Elvis also has lots of loose dangling
ends of hair that fall across his face. You'll see in almost every
picture / or caricature of Elvis, artists capitalize on this.
The forehead and overall shape of the
head
Whereas as Arnold Schwartzenegger (at
least in his younger days) boasted really hard angles in his face, Elvis
is softer edged. Might have been zero body fat for men wasn't a
requirement for males in the 50's, but he still has prominent cheek bones. They may drop
low (because they have a mass to them, they also seem to rise high as
they roll past the level of the eyes - not unlike the cheekbones you see
in Native Americans or folks of Asian descent. You'll see artists grab
on that too.
Overall Elvis shows a lot of forehead (because
he wears his hair up so high), but he also has a broad Hollywood
forehead. Again, traveling south down his face you encounter the cheekbones,
then rather full cheeks, then a relatively small maxilla behind
the mouth (that's the bone that holds your upper teeth - and explains
why his mouth may seem small compared to say Julia Roberts (who has a
very broad, flat-at-the-front-where-the- teeth-are type of maxilla)
then, down to the broad chin. So, if you relate all that to Mr. Average,
you could say as a starting point, you could play up the forehead and
cheeks, shrink the mouth, maybe even narrow the areas around the mouth
and top it off (or bottom it off) with a broad chin and jaw.
The eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes and
local shadows
Women just plain love Elvis' eyes. (At
least that's what I've gathered). Even if this is what women find sexy,
here's what I see as the observable deal. And what's that again Jeff?
It's the low riding eye lids, almost that sleepy eyed look. You see Jack
Nicholson (out of wanting to intimidate) and John Travolta do it - but
or him it's a total "I don't care what happens to you" look
when he's playing a bad dude. In any case it's the confidence and
control factor half mast eyes seem to exude. That's what I think it is
about his eyes women like. Then you couple the low eye lids with the
slightly quizzical raised eye brows (brows, not lids), you
get that come-on look.
And when you raise the eyebrows you get
more brow bone. And on Elvis, I swear he used (or his makeup artist
used) some kind eye shadow on that space between the eye brow and the upper
eye lid. So that's worth exploiting - at least on the young Elvis. Do
this on an overweight middle aged man and the results will be, well,
less than captivating. That's my guess. (I like women if there's any
doubt :-)
The other thing I want to point out
now -- and you'll see below -- is the primitive form and how alternating
light and shadow are used in the brow bone area of the eye. In fact, I
want you to look for this effect in not just the brow but in every part of the
face that is slightly cylindrical: like the brow bone, the nasal wings /
nostril, and the lower lip. In fact I highly recommend you review the Flash
lesson on The Lips and Mouth after you skim through this. Here's a close
up of the bone over the upper eye - look for the layers of light and
shadow:
Can you see the primitive form in the
brow bone over the eye?
The nose
You'll see his nose drawn with a very
broad root (where it comes out of the forehead between the eyes), that maintains
that width right on down to the sharp tip - especially when the caricature
is of an older Elvis. Caricatures of a young Elvis show a more
flattering nose. What seems to be an accurate description is that it is
broad at it's root, thick through the main body of the nose (the middle
wedge) and comes to a very tight tapered tip. A tip that has a dimple in
it dividing left and right halves. (And what's the cause of those
halves? Check out the Flash "Noses" lesson in the Archives or
on your CD if "greater alar cartilages" don't mean
anything to you.)
Check out these Elvis caricatures for
this nasal comparison:
http://www.nybooks.com/gallery/gallery-search?q=elvis
http://www.nybooks.com/gallery/399
http://www.nybooks.com/gallery/400
http://www.tomrichmond.com/caricatures/cari_6_sub2.html
http://www.johnkascht.com
And the official Elvis site:
http://www.elvis.com/
The lips and teeth
For a white guy Elvis has pretty full
lips. Even though - as mentioned above - the mouth overall
seems on the small side (from corner to corner) the lips -
especially the lower one is very full. That's worth exploiting. Of
course, how do you exaggerate a lip and keep it realistic looking? The
same secondary theme we've been hinting at: that primitive form in the
shape of a cylinder. In just one caricature below you'll see Elvis with
his teeth showing. Compare the lip shapes between pictures: is there a difference
in the lips? Can you identify it? Or is the general primitive from of a
tube preserved?
Notice in the photo above the direction
of the nasal philtrum: how does the Elvis "sneer" affect the
philtrum? Don't know what a "philtrum" is? See the Flash
lesson on Mouth and lips. Notice how there are no liens in the philtrum
and it's solely the play of highlight and shadow that suggest it's there
at all.
Also note where the lower lip casts it's
shadow in relation on the highlight on the top margin of the chin: if
the lower lip was really huge, what would happen to that chin highlight?
See the photo above to see this subtle chin highlight and the drawings
below to see how the really big lower lip changed or obliterated this
highlight.
(OK, I'll give you a hint: the
nasal philtrum is the little indentation, that little groove that runs between
the nose and the upper lip. But still go review the Flash lesson on the
Mouth and lips.)
The chin
No David Hopperfeld chin dimple (is
that a real name -- the guy on Baywatch?? I don't know :-), but Elvis
has a full rounded chin. About the only thing else I can say about it is
when you draw it, think "sphere" or "square" and try
to incorporate those shapes into the chin when you draw it.
There's more under the chin than on the
chin (and this is true in most people) because you have the neck, the
Adam's Apple, neck muscles, clothes and collars casting all sorts of
gradations of shadows and highlights. I avoided a lot of that by giving
our subject some big old 70's disco collars. When you draw these (shirt
collars), make sure you observe for the shadow beneath the collar and
draw something there that represents shadow.
Body Language
See john Kascht's painting again. I know,
I rarely throw bodies on the caricatures at this site (even though I
love doing life life drawing as much as drawing caricatures). Generally
though, if you can draw a face, you can draw the body.
http://www.johnkascht.com
Final comments about Elvis's trademark
Snarl
And like I said above, I flipped the
above picture around in Photoshop to make it face the same
way the caricatures below face. The difference? Elvis curls the left side of his lip, not
the right like in
the picture. As do 95 % of the rest of the world who can curl their lip
into a snarl like that - the 95% that can snarl only on the left. Like that.
By the way that
95% figure is by my own small research efforts. I draw from a sample
size of two. Me and Elvis: we both curl our lips on the left. That's
really a 100% result but I take away the 5% the way the network TV
stations always have their plus or minus 5% during the presidential
campaigns. So that's how I arrive at the 95%. It's more than likely your
girlfriend, boyfriend or spouse can only snarl or curl up their lip on
the left too. This is important: without this unconscious quirk of
attraction, you're relationship would probably crumble. On the other
hand, you're probably different handed. Ha! See? It means absolutely
nothing. OK I'll shut up about this now....New years has begun early
around these parts. Hic.
Enjoy!
Warmly,
Jeff
PS - Click over the pictures to
see the larger pictures and read more comments about each specific picture.
1) Off the cuff Elvis
that worked pretty dang well with woefully unfinished hair |
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2) Big, big, BEEG hair and big
chin Elvis |
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3) The George Clooney influenced
Elvis
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4) The "really bizarrely
exaggerated Elvis that starts to not look like Elvis"
Elvis. |
5) The young brash Elvis with a
really nasty, wicked smile Elvis |
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6) Study of Elvis eye - keep your
attention on the primitive form that's suggested by the light
and shadow pattern.
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