New drawing - Kiefer Sutherland caricature

It's been a while since I've put a finished drawing in the gallery, so here's my latest - Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer from 24 (AKA: Superman), saving the world from the nasty terrorists.

I've been hooked on 24 since season 1, and now we're midway through the fifth season, and Jack's still dodging bullets and withstanding torture to save the day. You could even say he's better than Superman, because he doesn't even allow love to get in the way of his job (and I'm sure he's impervious to kryptonite too!)

The only thing I don't get about 24, is howcome it always takes EXACTLY 24 hours to neutralize the terrorist threat? Sure, within 24 hours I could accept, but it's always EXACTLY 24 hours! Inconceivable!

Well, there it is. Hope you like it. My friends said it looks like Bruce Willis, but what do they know?! What do you think? Bruce or Kiefer? Maybe I'll try Bruce Willis next and we can spot the difference!

Tags: kiefer sutherland, jack bauer, 24, bruce willis, ctu, drawmyface

Pennywise the dancing clown

I want to try and write a little something about the pictures in the gallery. Since I started this blog, I've been doing that whenever I finish a painting, but I want to write about the old pictures too.

You may or may not have seen the portrait of Pennywise in the celebrity gallery. I drew this a long time ago, but it's remained in the gallery because I think it's very simple but effective.

I first saw the movie 'Stephen King's IT', when it was first shown on TV, way back around 1992, and I was at once terrified and amused by the scary clown with fluffy red hair and razor sharp teeth. The clown, played by Tim Curry, is merely the visible form of a much darker spirit which possesses the town of Derry.

Clowns are supposed to be funny, right? But look into the eyes of Pennywise, and you won't be laughing. He's the eater of souls, a clown gone wrong. Ronald McDonald he aint!

I enjoyed drawing the hair, or more accurately, drawing the backround around the hair. As his red hair is very bright, in black and white it's almost white, so I left the white of the paper showing through, and the background suggests the shape of the hair. I think it looks more scary in grayscale than if I had coloured it, the colour might have put some life back into this ghost of a clown!

Tags: Pennywise |IT |Stephen King |drawing |clown |Tim Curry |Derry |drawmyface

James Brown and perseverance

Here’s a quick sketch of the Godfather of soul. I saw the photo in a magazine and instantly saw the caricature. It’s nice when that happens. Sometimes you can stare at a photo for ages and still have no clue what to do with the face, while other times it just pops right out at you. I’m in the process of painting a caricature of a friend of mine, and it’s taken me 6 or more sketch attempts to find a likeness I’m happy with. You just have to persevere, if you keep at it, you’ll get there in the end.

Tags: James Brown |caricature |painting |drawmyface

Caricature sketch of Ben Stiller

Here's a quick sketch I did for the monthly caricature challenge at the Virtual Art forum:

Ben stiller has a very unusual face with distinctive features, which you'd think would make him easy to caricature, but he actually proved quite difficult.

The main features to note are of course his sticky-out ears, protruding brow, and defined facial muscles. I think if I try this again I'll have to experiment with different levels of exaggeration.

See this and more like it in the scrapbook.

Tags: Ben Stiller |caricature |sketch |drawing |art |drawmyface

what is Brrreeeport?

It's a blogging experiment by Robert Scoble. Something about blog search engines and how fast a word can get around the blogosphere. So join in the brrreeeport report!

Tags: brrreeeport |drawmyface |weblog |blogosphere |scoble

E_caricatures online caricature forum

I've just joined another online caricature forum - E-Caricatures

Check it out, all you budding caricaturists. You can post your work for feedback, check out how other artists approach their caricatures, and submit your photo to be caricatured by others (only genuine caricaturists or wannabes will be accepted, it's not just free-for-all caricatures).

Enjoy!

Tags: caricature |forum |caricature forum |artist |caricaturist |drawmyface

8000 and counting

Just noticed that Sunday saw my hit counter reach 8000! Time for celebrations! Maybe not, considering the site's been online for over 4 years, it could be seen as a rather paltry sum. Although . . . I'd say for at least the first two years, the only people who knew of drawmyface and visited it with any regularity were my family and close friends, so you could say that most of the 8000 visitors were in the last two years.

However, my hit counter doesn't account for the times when I visit the site to check how it's displayed after an update, so probably up to 2000 of those hits are from me!

Ah well, let's hope it's not another year before I hit 10,000

Tags: drawmyface

SEO for more web traffic

I've been trying to draw in more traffic to my site recently (it's been online about 4 years and still not reached 10,000 hits), and reading a lot about Search Engine Optimisation - SEO, a must-know topic if you want people to find your site in Google and other major search engines.

So what have I learned? There are two kinds of SEO: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO is what you do to the content of your website to make it "search-engine friendly", such as optimising certain keywords, and making sure these keywords appear in the right amounts in the right places on your page. Off-page SEO is how you increase your site's page ranking by getting more high-ranked sites to link back to your site. The more links to your site, the higher your page will rank in Google.

Sounds pretty simple, but there are many pitfalls to beware of. The initial step of choosing which keywords to optimise for is probably the most important decision you will make. Too popular and there will be far too much competition. Too obscure and nobody will ever find your site. Once you've figured out your keywords and integrated them into your content, you need to set about finding sites to exchange links with. There are many link exchange services out there, such as www.linkmetro.com which can help you find related sites wanting to exchange (links from related sites rank higher than random links), and if you can get high-ranking sites to link to you without having to link back to them, all the better (one-way links are ranked higher than reciprocal links).

So, if you can manage all that, and get a good collection of backlinks together, you will surely see your page climbing the rankings. I noticed recently that a Google search for "Bruce Lee caricature" lists my site in the top 30, and a search for my name "Dan Johnson" shows my site in the top 20!

Tags: SEO |optimisation |Google |keywords |link exchange |drawmyface

New painting - Jack Black caricature

Here's the new painting for this month - Jack Black. (Click the image to see the larger picture in the gallery.)

Some of you may only know Jack as an actor, if you've seen such films as School of Rock, High Fidelity, Envy, Shallow Hal, and just recently, the remake of King Kong. But Jack Black (or JB, as he is also known), is equally talented in the singing department, being one half of the hard-rockin' musical duo Tenacious D, along with his sidekick Kyle Gass (KG).

I've been a fan of 'The D' since they came to my attention a few years ago, but it only recently dawned on me that they would make good subjects for a caricature. This time I chose to just paint JB, but I think I'll attempt a Tenacious D portrait before too long.

The painting process was relatively painless, I didn't have too much trouble with the likeness (see the scrapbook for the initial sketch). The only trouble I had was with the complex checked pattern on the shirt. At one point it was going so horribly wrong that I just whitewashed the entire shirt and started again! That's the luxury of painting that you don't get with a pencil if you press too hard. To see the different stages of the painting, visit the drawing board.

Hope you like it, all comments are welcome.

Dan

P.S. If you haven't already, why not sign up for my mailing list and receive the monthly newlsetter informing you of any recent additions.

Tags: Jack Black |Tenacious D |caricature |painting |drawmyface

Delays

Ok, so it's taking a little longer than I planned, but I have to say it's looking really good right now! Just a few more finishing touches to apply. Possibly tomorrow, if not, Thursday at the latest (why do I keep making these promises?!) Anyway, I'll let you know.

Tags: painting |drawmyface

Drawing board is finished

I've been promising to do it for ages, and yesterday I finally decided to spend some time finishing the drawing board section. So now you can see the step-by-step painting process of four of my paintings - Fan Wei, Paul McCartney, Chris Martin and Jeff Buckley. I plan to take photos of all my future paintings at various stages of completion, and will add them to the drawing board page when I have time.

While I was at it, I spruced up the page design a bit, with some background images in the sidebars and a gray background, which is a little easier on the eye. So now it's back to the painting! Almost done, so watch this space . . .

Tags: caricature |painting |painting tutorial |Paul McCartney |Chris Martin |Jeff Buckley |Fan Wei |drawmyface

syndicate my site

As you can see I have now added a link to this blog's feed (the orange "XML" button in the sidebar), so you can read my new posts from the comfort of your own newsreader. For those of you who don't know what XML, RSS, Atom feeds, and all the rest of it are (I didn't have the first idea until just recently), I'll give you a simple explanation:

Whenever I post a new entry on this blog, it's automatically converted into an XML "feed", which can be published on other websites, and is automatically updated. This is good if you want to have the latest news headlines displayed on your site, for example. It also saves a lot of time if you regularly read articles published on many different sites. Instead of surfing to each site one after another, and checking for updates, you can use one of hundreds of newsreader services or programs, enter the feed address of all the sites you want to subscribe to, and then your newsreader automatically receives the latest updates from all your subscriptions, so you only need to visit one page, and you can browse through the news headlines, check the stock market, and catch up on all your favourite blogs (including mine of course!)

So, if you don't currently use a newsreader, and would like to give it a try, the one I'm currently using is Google Reader. If you want to subscribe to my blog in Google Reader, you need to sign up for an account (I think you can use your gmail account if you have one), then go to "edit subsrciptions", add a feed URL, and enter my site's feed URL: http://www.drawmyface.co.uk/blogger/atom.xml You'll see a preview of the subscription, then just hit "Subscribe" and you're done. Now every time you come back to Google Reader, it'll show you the latest entry from my blog. If you don't fancy Google, there're plenty more to choose from. Newsgator is another popular one.

Tags: RSS |syndication |feeds |drawmyface

Back on track!

Ok, I've finally started a new painting, and it's looking really good so far. With minimal distractions I should get it finished this weekend. What else? The flash site is coming along nicely too, and I'm planning to start offering postcard prints of all my pictures for sale on the site. I'm considering doing comissions again, too. If you know anyone who might be interested in a comission, email me to check my availability. Oh yeah, I'm also being very optimistic (or naive) and putting a PayPal donate button on the site, so if you're feeling generous, or got lots of spare cash lying about, that you don't know what to do with . . .

Stay tuned for the new painting, and as always, thanks for reading!

Tags: painting |drawmyface