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.

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.