Chapter 3 | WRONG ON PURPOSE

Exercise 1: You can make funny or strange faces with the eyes, nose and mouth drawn in the wrong place on purpose. Try experimenting with this yourself. Always start from the egg-shaped head.

Exercise 2: Draw a few heads with deliberately overly thick, thin or wrong necks. Also make the shoulders overly narrow, wide or angular. For comparison, I’ll show you the head, neck and shoulders from Chapter 1 again.

You also get a funny effect if you turn the egg-shaped head upside down, so with the pointed side up. In these two examples the eyes, nose and mouth are in the right place again.

EXTRA 1: A famous figure with a head where the top is much smaller than the bottom is Jabba the Hutt, a gangster boss from Star Wars. Here you can see how you could draw his face in a few steps. Start with the triangular shape of the head and then fill in the parts of the face. Notice how high the eyes are.

In 1834, the French cartoonist Daumier used the shape of a pear for a caricature in a newspaper. On the right he clearly shows the shape of the pear, with the stem and leaves. In caricatures, a person’s external features are always greatly exaggerated, in this case the double chin, the enormous sagging cheeks, the gruff, frugal mouth and the narrowed eyes with furrowed eyebrows. The caricatured person did not appear to be a very cheerful person.

EXTRA 2: Draw a pear and make a face in it.

To conclude this chapter: here is a comic by the American artist Bill Griffith about “Zippy” who also has the pointed side of his head at the top.