Earlier this year, I finally got around to watching the Sergio Leone "Dollars" trilogy and started working on a caricature of Clint Eastwood as he appeared in the films. Here are the stages that the piece went through along with the final result.
I decided to approach this piece by starting with the silhouette. I noodled the outline until I found some shapes and angles that I thought were compelling and interesting to look at, while conveying the laid-back dexterity of the character. For me, it's a bit easier to go into the line-work stage if I'm confident with the overall flow of the piece.
Next, I went in with several stages of line drawing on top of the silhouette. During the line drawing phase, I attempted to work out any issues with the proportions of the silhouette, and tried to clearly define the features of the character. This stage was the most time consuming since I wanted to make sure everything in the piece worked and was relatively clean before moving onto the painting stages.
Before adding color to the piece, I went over the whole thing in black and white. The main difficulty was in clearly differentiating the various materials on the character (skin, denim, metal, etc).
Finally, I added some color on top of the black and white painting with overlay layers. This is similar to using washes on top of a drawing - it preserves the values established in the earlier stages. I wanted the final piece to have that desaturated look that films from the 60s and 70s have, which overlay layers are perfect for. Overall I felt that this piece was a good learning experience and I plan to do more caricatures soon.
