Drawing Willow

The following is part of a blogburst, a simultaneous, cross-linked posting of many blogs on a single theme. This blogburst concerns Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff series, Angel. For a guide to other Buffy/Angel articles, go to The Buffy BlogBurst Index.

Here’s a confession: I can’t do good caricatures. But I’d like to learn. Here’s another confession: I get nothing done without a deadline. So when Meryl Yourish announced the Buffy BlogBurst, I thought, hey, a deadline! That’ll force me to work on caricatures! I emailed Meryl and told her I’d be doing something with caricatures of Buffy cast members.

Then I noodled around a little with pencil and paper.

Then I forgot about it.

Then came the reminder in my email. Deadline! Lovely deadline! Wellspring of all productivity!

In some ways, Buffy cast members are ideal for this. I know their faces well, which is necessary for me to judge if a likeness has that feeling of "oh, her!" But I haven’t seen many cartoons of Buffy characters. This is important, because most political cartoonists, when they draw (say) George Bush, aren’t really drawing Bush – they’re drawing a sort of unspoken cartoonist’s consensus of what cartoons of Bush look like. And we recognize Bush, not because the cartoons have any particular resemblance to Bush, but because they look like other cartoons of Bush we’ve seen.

The trouble is, it becomes hard for me to draw Bush my own way, because I can’t even figure out what my own way is. My imagination is poisoned by images of what other (often, much better) cartoonists have done with Bush.

The problem with drawing TV characters is that most actors have bland, pretty faces (as discussed in this post). Being "pretty," to a great extent, is dependent on having few or no outstanding features to caricature.

For some reason – maybe just because she’s my favorite character – I decided to draw Willow.

This was my first attempt. Drawn using this photo as reference. As I was working on it, a friend of mine – attempting to be kind, but not realizing who I was trying to draw – told me it was a "nice Hillary Clinton." Several of my other friends then agreed, a nice Hillary Clinton. Too late, it occurs to me that a big disadvantage of blogging caricatures is the high likelihood of embarassing myself with my incompetence. Oh, well.

Looking at it now, the big problem with it isn’t that the features are wrong , but that none of them scream "Willow." There are lots of pretty woman who smile and have round cheeks, after all.

Time to get some more photo reference. At first the photos I found weren’t very helpful; eventually I realized that this was because most photos are of Alyson Hannigan, but what I needed was photos of Willow. (A photo like this, for instance, just emphasizes the way Alyson Hannigan looks the same as other pretty woman – and bears no resemblance to Willow). After wasting too much time clicking through publicity photos, I run across the solution – "screencaps," still images from the TV show itself. A little googling turned up the wonderful Alyson Hannigan Corner, where some blessedly obsessed AH fan has gathered hundreds (thousands) of screencaps of Willow.

Here’s my second try (not include a half-dozen false starts). Deciding that a more detailed drawing style might help – I’m a big fan of David Levine’s work – I had done some careful work on the features. Too bad she ended up looking like a troll. Worse, although some of the features are right, overall the drawing has nothing of Willow’s personality in it.

On the bright side, I was getting a better idea (in my mind, if not on paper) of what Willow’s nose looked like. And I realized that I needed to draw a hairstyle which emphasized Hannigan’s distinctive widow’s peak.

I spent a while just looking at screencaps and doodling. I decide that I need to emphasize how baby-faced Willow is (that’s why Hannigan seems so adorable-looking; despite being thin as a rail, she has a very round face).

Try number three (not counting many aborted attempts), and (to my eyes, anyway) the first successful drawing. About damn time! I don’t think David Levine has anything to fear from me, but at least this seems to capture some of Willow’s personality, as well as being a decent likeness.

Here, if you’re curious, is the photo I looked at the most while drawing this.

Of course, because I think it’s good right now doesn’t mean a thing; maybe in a week I’ll look at this with fresh eyes and realize how at one with the suckage it is. For now, though, I do a quick coloring job (I can’t decide if the colors help or hurt the drawing) and – forgetting all about putting it online – go to sleep.

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