The purpose of this project was to compose a cameo and caricature of one of our fellow classmates. A cameo is a profile view of a person, usually in a decorative circular frame. These images appeared carved in ivory, stone, glass, or shell on brooches popular since before the first century A.D. A caricature is a cartoonish and exaggerated illustration. These can be identified by their oversized heads and disproportionate features.  My process began on an iPad in the app Adobe Draw and using the Creative Cloud, I transferred the images to Adobe Illustrator to clean up the line work and process the image to it's final stage. This project will outline the creative process I took to create a cameo and caricature illustration out of photographs of the model.  

Brittanica Image Quest

iPad

Adobe Draw app

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Illustrator

Using a classical style of cameo from 19th century Italy, similar to some family jewelry I own, I wanted to capture the profile with simple lines to capture the essence of a carving. This process was also applied to the photograph I took of my model with Adobe Draw.

Using the Adobe Draw app on the iPad, I opened an image layer and I captured a photo of Morag in profile in the software. From here, I turned down the opacity of the image so that I could draw over this. 

On a new draw layer, I used the stylus to capture the most important lines of the image. I used the round brush feature with black paint to have stylistic lines keep the drawing simple at this stage.

Once this drawing was created, I removed the original image layer. Using the Creative Cloud, I moved the image directly from the iPad to Adobe Illustrator on my desktop computer. Illustrator offers vector graphics that are difficult to create with just the iPad and Stylus, so I was able to centre the image within an elipse  and give that line a decorative border from the brush library. This was to emulate the frame of a brooch.

To create the final image, I added a radial gradient in greyscale to additionally give the drawing a 3 dimensional form as a real cameo would.

I began my caricature of Morag using the same first steps as the cameo. I captures a portrait image as it's own layer and turned down the opacity so that in a new drawing layer I could begin to use black lines to show detail in the face.

I wanted to include much more detail in the caricature so I used a variety of brushes and shades of paint to make the face more realistic. In the next steps I used colours which I matched to the photo using that feature in Adobe Draw. I created the skin layer beneath the black outline so that they would not interfere with each other and I could use the eraser tool freely. 

I exaggerated some of the shading so that the image would still contain form when sized down to include the body. I placed another image layer of a woman posed sitting down cross legged with a cup of coffee which is what I creatively decided with the model she should be doing to represent part of her personality. 

Once I had completed my work in Draw, I sent the drawing through the creative cloud to Illustrator to give the image final touches and clean up the lines.

To keep the spirit of exaggeration which is in the definition of a caricature, I placed Morag in a giant green coffee cup!