explain yourself

this is our subject. you might call him captain kirk, denny crane, or professor friedrich bhaer, but you damn well know that he prefers to be called william shatner. you might even know some trivia about him--that he's a vegetarian, that he breeds horses, that he suffers from tinnitus--but have you ever tried to draw him? if you have then you might know this bit of trivia about mr. shatner--he is incredibly hard to caricature.

i learned this nugget of information secondhand initially. i am an artist, but i am not an artist who devotes any time to the practice of caricaturing celebrities. i do, however, know quite a few artists who do this sort of thing and who are pretty good at it, and they uniformly agree that a successful william shatner caricature is something akin to the holy grail in their field. most claim never to have seen one, and all admit that they have never drawn one themselves.

so of course i had to try my hand at it. i was under no illusion that i would produce a successful caricature, but i wanted to understand the difficulty of the task the way they did. outfitted with the photo of a young, dashing shatner posted above, a 2B tombow, and a post-it, i proceeded to walk a mile in their shoes.

the result: i am convinced of my friends' earlier findings. william shatner is indeed hard to caricature. which leads us to the question, "why the hell is it so hard to caricature this man?" i have no idea, but i intend to find out. this blog will be the laboratory in which we dissect this conundrum. i say "we" because i mean for this to be a team effort. i will post my own lame attempts, but i will also post the lame (and, god willing, not-so-lame) attempts of others. and we will discuss, and analyze, and correct, and retract, and assert and argue until we completely lose track of our original intention. and then we'll get back on track and do it all over again.

so consider this an open call for submissions. send in those embarrassing shatner drawings that you tucked into the back of your portfolio, and maybe together we can get to the bottom of this.