Charlie Day Tutorial

You may know Charlie from always sunny but if not you can google Charlie Day and you will see him. Or even better watch the show, it is very funny.
So I like to work on paper first to get down ideas. I just can't find anything to work better for sketches than a pad of paper so naturally the first step in my tutorial is do a pencil sketch of your subject. Do a bunch of pencil sketches but choose one you like.
It doesn't need to be gallery ready you don't have to render it for hours but it should have enough information for you to base your painting on.
Here's mine:

The eyes are a little off and the hair is just scribbled but you can tell where the planes of the face turn and how everything will be être he'd and compressed. As long as it looks enough like him and his character is there then who cares if it's a good drawing because this drawing is just notes you are going to use for the painting. The next step is going digital.Now I prefer to have photoshop open with a reference photo and a workspace. You can also print the reference photo so your entire monitor is your workspace either way works. Start by just redrawing your sketch sometimes I scan the sketch in but then I can't take advantage of moving it up a layer and having some transparency behind the lines. This sketch can be even more rough than the first one but you want to make sure the shapes are all where you want them to be because this will serve as a grid for you to put color into.

As you can see he is just a scribble at this point and you've already been reading this tutorial for like three minutes. I promise I won't waste your time but having a good starting point and knowing what direction you want to take this is essential in caricature.Without further a due we move on to color you just want to block in your basic pallet I like to color sample from the reference photo and label where I sampled colors from so I can get a good idea of how different areas catch the light and change due to angles and skin tone variation here is an example of what I mean.

At this point you can just map out where color is going to fall based off of your sketch and by observing the reference photo. Don't try to jump into detail right away just indicate where everything will go and make sure the color is making it look dimensional. Once your painting looks something like what I have above now you can start defining where shapes start and end and still try and remain rather blocky in other words only add things that help sculpt your painting into something that looks solid and keep sampling from the pallet you created it will help you from making your color too muddy. Here is an example:

At this point it is ok to put a couple of highlights but be mindful too many can over do it. I only put a few on the nose and eyes and not much anywhere else because I wanted the focus to come back to that because most of his expression is in his eyes. Also be conscious of the fact that what might look like a white highlight could very easily just be a medium toned color against a slightly darker colorOk now we can add a little detail just pick a few areas of focus to add detail if you just copy all the detail from everywhere your going to overwork it and the viewer won't know what to look at you want to make sure the viewer always knows what you are trying to say about your subject or else why say it at all. Ok this is what I mean.

Look at the way I once again just focussed on the eyes and nose. The nose has freckles and the eyes are almost fully rendered this is where you have to really think about how you want things to look. You need to stray a little bit from the reference photo for this step because the way I pushed his eyes inward he would look weird if I didn't angle the eyes in a little so the whole shape of both eyes are tilted a little bit towards each other. This is what helps sell the idea that his eyes are really built like that and it isn't just a distorted photo. Some artists will get too excited about all the cool tools in photoshop and just start warping and stretching the face and then it looks so flat. So being aware of designing 3d shapes will help you avoid making flat paintings. Ok next and final step. Well final for me because I like to keep stuff more loose and alive at the fear of overworking a piece. I'm going to exaggerate some color. Up to this point my color choices have pretty much been true to what you may see in Charlie's actual face. Now I need to step back and look at how I can make his color just as out of this world and interesting as his proportions. So looking at the color pallet we created we see the pallet for the eyes is more red than the rest of the skin( aside from the lips). But that is perfect because he has green  eyes and green and red are contrasting and we want to bring focus to the expression in his eyes and so this whole thing doesn't just look like I colored his eyes red with a marker I will darken it up in addition to adding red. This should really sink those eyes in and make the viewer stare at them.

I also added a little detail to the beard and hair but not too much to distract from the focus. Notice how soft I kept his shirt and neck. Focus focus focus!!!!!!!! Thank you, Tyler Fontes