This Hulk inspired caricature was for an awesome mate of mine who recently celebrated his 30th last weekend.
This was certainly a fun piece to create and Karl was absolutely wrapped when he opened it at the awesome picnic he put on. But the piece itself wasn’t without it’s problems (as you will soon see why)…
So How Did I Get From This To This?
Well first of all it wasn’t easy…
In fact I really had no intention of turning him into a Hulk until later on. So when I started the caricature it was started just like most others do.
I received the photo reference from his sister who helped to set everything up – Thank Nic 🙂
And off I went sketching and painting, gradually turning him into a caricature which after an hour or so lead to this:
A nice big blue floating head 🙂
And that’s where I got stuck…
Usually I would have forged on with some colour and it would have ended up being a good looking caricature – but seeing as he was a good mate I felt like doing something a bit different.
I was thinking of maybe doing a movie poster, or something that was a bit more stylish but it just didn’t fit – it didn’t really portray Karl as I knew him.
That’s when I came up with the idea for something much cooler – but just to confirm it I messaged his sister and it all came together – he was about to get hulkified!
That’s When I Hit A Roadblock
Because I didn’t start with the end in mind I now had a smiling Hulk to deal with.
As you can see it looked a bit ridiculous – it really just looked like a green guy doing a muscle pose – there was no real Hulk aggression – and really what’s Hulk if he isn’t angry?
This was now a huge problem for me.
Karl was smiling but I needed him to be angry, Â I had no photos of him getting angry so how was I supposed to make him look angry without losing the accuracy – because without the accuracy there is no caricature.
Enter More Photo Reference
IÂ fetched some pics of angry Hulk and approximated Karls angry face from the pics you see above.
I was really paranoid of losing Karls likeness in creating his aggressive face, but it needed to be done in order to sell the aggression in the piece.
So I pressed on…
Little by little he turned from ‘Smiling Karl’, to ‘The Peoples Eyebrow Karl’ and hours later eventually to this guy…
I’m still unsure if I succeeded in maintaining his likeness as I transformed him into the Hulk – but overall I am pretty stoked with the way it turned out and I hope he is too – Happy Birthday champ 🙂
