from humble (read: crappy) beginnings

first attempts at anything are almost guaranteed to be pretty awful, and this caricature is no different. really, it's not even a caricature. i was only trying to sketch him in a pretty straightforward style and get a sense of his proportions.

which brings us to the first hurdle when caricaturing shatner: his features and proportions are not exactly generic, but very close to generic. a big but not too big nose; eyes that are close together but not too close together; a mouth that's wide but not too wide. these deviations from the average are all so slight that to push any of them is to push him out of that fragile shatnerian orbit. therefore the above sketch looks like it could be a lot of people--a young tom hanks, a young rick astley, a young timothy hutton--but it does not look like a young william shatner.

which brings us to a second point about this project: we're focusing on young shatner, not old shatner. old people typically have a lot of easily caricatured features--big ears, lots of wrinkles, gigantic thick-rimmed glasses--time and nature have done all of the work for you. growing old is sort of like turning into a living caricature of your younger self.

ok, now that i've officially embarrassed myself, we'll be moving on to the failures (and the occasional, triumphant, not-so-crappy sketches) of others. again, i remind you that this is an open forum. i have a few drawings submitted by friends (we'll see if that designation holds once their work has been, um, critiqued) that will make their way into this blog soonish, but we're hoping for a tribble-like proliferation here.