Customer Reviews

How to Airbrush Caricatures [VHS]

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The intended audience for this Kent Lind video seems to be experienced T-Shirt painters who want to start caricatures, or improve their work. It doesn't discuss types of paint (other than a quick reference to the name brand of paint that he said he was "using today"), or the airbrush hardware itself. He often seemed to be plucking at the tip of the airbrush, but didn't say if this was just a nervous habit or if he was clearing paint buildup. He also seemed to take a test blast of each of his many, many airbrushes at his palm, but didn't say why he was doing that.

This video starts with the artist talking about the three colors which he always keeps premixed. First, he brings out a dark brown and paints a stripe. Next, another dark brown, and the third color is, you guessed it, another variant on dark brown. It had me thinking this was going to be one boring painting, but over the course of the hour he uses a *lot* of colors, even going so far as to use two different kinds of white.

He then moves on to a T-Shirt that has Robert De Nero sketched on it in pencil. Over the next hour, he paints an amazing caricature of De Nero. The photography is clear, often showing close-ups. On the other hand, it's not always easy to tell the angle of his airbrush or even the distance from the fabric he is spraying.

Either because he was fast, or because the movements were subtle, it was hard to see how he did it, but one instant he'd be drawing very fine lines, then coloring them back on one side into a solid color. Then he'd draw a number of different strokes to make hair, and pull back and darken exactly the area he wanted. Clearly he was very confident of his airbrushwork -- when the painting was done, he outlined it in violet and flared it out with rapid flicks of the brush from a good way back, apparently unconcerned that a slip here could spoil an hour of work with a sploch of violet on De Nero's face.

There were a number of places where I thought he'd made mistakes, such as painting too dark or over-emphasizing a facial line. After he'd made more passes with other colors, though, it all seemed to come out great. Another time he did what seemed to be fairly crude blue pinstripes on De Nero's tie, but later "wash" painting and strokes of white to make it look like it had a shine blended it in so it looked fine. I couldn't figure out, though, with all that spraying he did, why he didn't have much overspray on the white parts of the shirt that I could see.

Later in the painting, he used white to make eye catchlights and otherwise improve the picture, but only on one side of the face. Then he paused to show how the use of the white had improved things, by showing the two halves of the face, after he's only highlighted the one side by white.

As he painted, he gave a lot of tips. For example, he said that he had found that fingernails should be very subtle, and that doing great detail here detracts from the finished work.

There wasn't a lot of help in learning how to pick out the key characteristics of a subject to make a caricature, but there was a lot of discussion and exhibition of painting people with an airbrush. Anyone interested in doing airbrushing that goes beyond stencils will probably find a lot of techniques and inspiration in this video.