Interview with Jason Seiler

Hello Jason, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background in CG and from where you have taken the training?

Sure. Well, I am an artist currently living in Chicago with my wife Kat and my two awesome daughters, Isabeau (6) and Ava (3). I have painted for publications such as TIME, GOLF Magazine, MAD, The New York TImes, The New York Observer, The Village Voice, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, KING Magazine, and Penguin Group, to name a few. I also had the pleasure of working as a character designer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. I worked on characters such as the Red Queen, the Bandersnatch, the Executioner, March Hare, and the Tweedles. That was a great experience. I also teach a high end advanced class on Caricature for Schoolism. For more information on that, please visit www.schoolism.com

As far as my background in CG, there really isn’t much to say. To be honest, I never wanted to paint digitally and avoided it for quite a while. I didn’t really like much of the digital work that I was seeing at the time; it seemed to look too digital, too smooth and perfect. I am mostly self-taught, but I studied for a couple years at The American Academy of Art in Chicago. I love traditional painting the most, especially watercolor and oil.

A few years back, my friend Joe Bluhm talked me about painting digitally. So, I bought the cheapest and smallest Wacom tablet that I could find, I think it cost me a $110. The first week that I had the tablet, I was called by Muscle Magazine to paint Arnold Schwarzenegger. I decided that it was a good time to start digital painting, and did my first ever digital painting for publication. I never had any sort of training at all when it comes to digital painting. In fact, I am horrible when it comes to computers. If there’s ever anything wrong with my computer, I have to call one of my friends to help and fix the problem. All that I knew when I started painting digitally is that I wanted my paintings to look more traditional than digital. I keep it simple, I don’t use much, I don’t manipulate or distort with the computer. I draw, and I paint. I use the paint brush tool and sometimes use layers.

When I first started painting digitally, I was interested in painting everything as photorealistic as I could, and if you know how to render, achieving photo realism when painting digitally is easy to do. So my digital work at the beginning looked too digital for my taste. It’s taken me a few years or so to develop my painting technique so that it feels more traditional. I prefer to see brush work and layers of paint showing through, I enjoy texture in my work. So, when I paint digitally, I paint in the same sort of way that I would paint if I were painting traditionally. I sometimes start off with an under painting as you would when painting in oils. I can still get a very realistic look, while keeping the work brushy. The one thing I really love about painting digitally is that I can experiment so much. There’s so much you can do, and I learn so much with each painting I do.

Please tell us while painting caricature which things to watch or required for nice looking caricature.

Obviously the most important thing is making sure that you capture the subject’s likeness. Exaggerating the subject’s features seems to be the most important thing to beginners, but it is important to understand how to exaggerate correctly.

This comes from studying and understanding the skull and the muscles attached to the skull. Understanding the structure and foundation of what makes up the human face is good place to start. I would recommend buying a skull to study and draw. Draw people as much as you can realistically with no exaggeration. Try to find and locate the skull within their face. When I start a caricature, I make sure that I have at least 3 to 5 pictures of the person, from different views if possible. I look at their face and I decide where I feel the “weight” of their face is. Do they have a larger or high forhead, and a smaller chin, or a large heavy chin with a smaller forhead. Or, some people may have a long stretched out head with a high forehead and long chin. Does the person have a wide face or a narrow face? What’s the shape of the person’s head? Does it look like a box, a peanut, or an egg? Next I look at the eyes, nose, and mouth and decide where within the face they reside. How much space is around the inner face? Now look at the individual features, are the eyes close together, or farther apart, are they large or small, popping out, or sunken in. What’s the relationship between the eyes and the nose?

Is it a long line nose, or a short chubby nose? What’s the relationship between the nose and the mouth? Is there a lot of space between the nose and mouth, or no space at all? How much space is there from the eyes to the mouth, or the mouth to the chin? These are some of the questions you must ask yourself when starting a caricature. After I have agreed on the shape of the person’s head and the placement of their features, I focus the rest of my attention to the subject’s eyes and mouth. The eyes MUST be 100%, if the eyes are wrong the entire caricature will suffer. I believe the eyes and mouth hold the key to capturing the essence and true character of a person.

Q. Broadening forehand or chin, increase the size of ears, cheeks, shrinking nose, eyes... Is this caricature? What’s the actual definition of perfect caricature?

For me “caricature” is not about picking out one feature and exploiting it. It’s about the face as a “whole”. Everything about a person’s face is special and unique. I pay close attention to a subjects eyes, nose and mouth, but I pay just as much attention to the subjects ears. For every action, there is a reaction. You cannot just exaggerate someone’s nose without it affecting the rest of the face. All features and structure must follow. Caricature is simply exaggerating the truth. Taking what really exists and pushing the truth while maintaining a solid likeness. If done correctly, a good caricature can capture a person so accurately that it can sometimes look more like the person than a photo ever could. By exaggerating the elements of truth found within their face, you can bring the subjects true character to the surface for all to see. I believe subconsciously our brains remember people in an exaggerated form of one way or another. For example, you can immediately pick out a close friend of family member out of a crowd of people without directly looking right at them. It’s because your mind remembers the shape and form as well as the placement of features that make your friends or family members recognizable.