Tag Archives: albert einstein

Jun 4 2010

How to Draw the Caricature of Dr. Albert Einstein – the Greatest Scientist of the Twentieth Century

Dr. Albert Einstein’s caricature is among the easiest to draw. He has features that hanker for the caricaturist’s eyeballs. His hair, his nose, and his quirked-up eyebrows that push the skin of his forehead into those innumerable furrows and lines – all demand your attention. They leap out of his face and grab hold of your hand to make you draw them!

Caricature, Cartoon, Portrait, Drawing of Albert Einstein, the greatest mind of the twentieth century, who won a nobel prize for his discovery of the photoelectric effect.

Why? I wonder.

Excellent. So his face isn’t like Jack Nicholson’s (with a signboard that says, “everything you see, you can caricature for 99 cents”,) nor is it like George Clooney’s (a treasure hunt in a Martian desert.) Einstein’s face is somewhere between that of these two. It tempts you to fetch your pencil and your drawing pad as the three prominent features in his face are really, madly prominent!

I discussed the folly of trying to caricature “everything” in the previous tutorial, “How to Draw the Caricature of Jack Nicholson – The Wolf.” Listening to my own advice (yes, unlike many, I trust my own advice,) I decided to exaggerate the following features.

  • The Hair
  • The forehead with one brow quirked-up
  • The Nose

The first step in creating any drawing is to…begin, and so I began. When I draw faces, I draw the eyes first, and those eyes watch me draw. This can be an especially unnerving experience when the person watching you draw is Dr. Albert Einstein! I kept my cool, avoided his assessing glare, and continued to sketch. After drawing in the eyes, I moved to the nose, and then to the lips…his eyes continued to follow my pencil, everywhere.

After a while, I gave up, and looked straight into his eyes, and then I realized that there was more to Einstein than his face. I began to remember what I had read of his life. Einstein was known for his brain. He was thought to have been born with a bigger brain.

Lo and Behold! If the expression sounds archaic, please excuse me – for I am (archaic) too.

So…once again…

Lo and Behold! I decided to exaggerate the size of his forehead!

Here is how the caricature was created.

Caricaturing Einstein’s Eyes and Brows

Check out any picture of Einstein, he’s got a bemused look on his face. He seems to be looking at world and saying, “It can all be explained through the General Principle of Relativity.” So I pushed up his quirky eyebrow a tad more to exaggerate the look.

Caricaturing Einstein’s Nose

Einstein’s nose isn’t one of those razor-sharp, slice-n-dice kind of nose. It’s a soft, round, and bulbous nose – a little longer than the normal. All this makes the nose-bulb(?) look like it’s experiencing the full force of gravity!

(Dear Sir Isaac Newton, I hope that you and Dr. Einstein get along well in heaven, and both of you along with Dr. John Wheeler, use the quantum foam to stay in touch with the scientists of our time. I assure you, they need your help to clean up the BP Oil Spill Mess!)

Oh, the nose! As you can surmise, I wanted the nose to become longer, and its bulb to become more bulbous; so I pulled the lower anchor points out of the feature frame, until the nose overshot the lips. (To understand anchor points and feature frame, read “The Evolution of a Caricaturist“.)

Caricaturing Einstein’s Hair

Einstein’s hair is magnificent. It’s white, long, and fluffy (he used a shampoo that he invented himself – right?) I added the effect of the electric hair blower on the white, long, and fluffy, to make them more prominent.

I also fluffed up Einstein’s mustache and tweaked it a little at the ends:)

Caricaturing Einstein’s Forehead

Inspired by Dr. Einstein’s supervising eyes, I made his forehead and also his head, bigger. Remember that the head is almost hemispherical. I decided to exaggerate not the size of the hemisphere, but its shape! Look at the forehead closely and try to visualize the head – you’ll “see” that the shape tends to be a sphere more than a hemisphere.

Einstein’s forehead has a lot of prominent lines. I exaggerated the lines. Look at the right edge of the forehead – you can even see the folds. When your exaggeration moves out of the facial space (at the edges) it becomes stronger.

That was all I did – and Einstein’s caricature winked at me:) My job was done!

If you are interested in exploring the techniques involved in drawing caricatures further, I recommend the following:

Have fun caricaturing:-) Spread the Smile!

Advertisement
May 16 2010

Cartoon/Caricature – Albert Einstein – The Greatest Scientist of the Twentieth Century.

Can you trace Einstein’s thoughts?
My take?!
“Why did I get the Nobel for the discovery of Photoelectric effect and not for the Theory of Relativity?”

Caricature, Cartoon, Portrait, Drawing of Albert Einstein, the greatest mind of the twentieth century, who won a nobel prize for his discovery of the photoelectric effect.

Why? I wonder.

Albert Einstein is probably the most caricatured scientist. His appearance has helped artists create the stereotype of the absent-minded genius yet somewhat crazy scientist of our science-fiction stories and movies.

Biographical Information – Albert Einstein

Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, in the German Empire. His father was an engineer and a salesman, who started his own electrical goods company in 1880. This company manufactured equipment that used direct current, and it went out of business 14 years later, when alternating current became the order of the day. Einstein was born in an affluent family (check out his childhood pictures – photographs don’t lie,) and so he received home-tutoring from Max Talmud, who ate with the Einsteins every Thursday, and in exchange (apparently,) he tutored Einstein in Science, Math, and Philosophy.

In his early years, Einstein had speech difficulties (really?), but otherwise he was a bright student, and so he obviously was also a rebel. Though Einstein lived and worked in Berlin for a long time, in 1933, the persecution of Jews led to Einstein moving out of Berlin and emigrating to the US. (This tells us that Einstein wasn’t just an average nerdy genius, he was a smart genius!)

Read Albert Einstein’s biography here.

Einstein’s Head & Brain:

  • Einstein’s head, according to his mother, was extremely large and angular at the back.
  • Einstein’s brain was removed without his family’s permission (stolen?) when he died. His brain was then sliced into pieces by Mr. Harvey, the pathologist who had removed the brain from his body, “in the interest of science.” He concluded that his brain had developed differently from that of others. (How else could he justify his nefarious deed?)

Einstein’s Love Life:

There were at least three serious relationships in Einstein’s life. The first happened when he was a mere lad of seventeen – he fell in love with his landlord’s daughter. Next, he fell in love with Milveca Maric at the University and married her. Finally, he divorced Milveca after 11 years of marriage, and married Elsa Lowenthal – who he had been romantically involved with, even while he was married to Milveca. (Being the genius he was, I guess problematic relationships are expected of him – if nothing else, they enhance his aura.)

Facts:

Einstein’s Thoughts / Quotes:

Upon Death: “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”

Upon Religion: “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

Upon being Recognized on the Streets: “Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein.”

Here are some more interesting quotes from Einstein:

  • Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. (It’s only responsible for people falling –  people are themselves responsible for selecting the location of the fall.)
  • The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. (Yes, of course…and the equations of the Brownian Motion are the easiest!)
  • The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. (Ah well! Dear Mr. Da Vinci,  please reveal your sources.)
  • Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater. (I guess this is what you called Relativity?)
  • Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the the universe. (The fact that we quote this, proves something about human stupidity – doesn’t it?)
  • I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. (Thanks for the prophecy, Dr. Einstein! We’ll march straight into World War IV!)

Source: (http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html)

Read more about Einstein at: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/life/index.php

Jan 27 2010

Cool Caricaturist – David Levine (1926-2009)

David Levine‘s Caricatures are a phenomenon. Levine’s caricatures used to regularly appear in The New York Review of Books. As a child he dreamed of becoming a painter, but to sustain himself, he turned illustrator. he continued to illustrate until the 1960s, when he became a caricaturist for The Review. In addition to The Review, His works appeared in “Esquire, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, Sports Illustrated, New York Magazine, Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Nation, Playboy,” etc. Wow! Isn’t that something? (Source: Wikipedia.)

View some of his caricatures here (at The New York Review of Books Gallery of Levine’s Caricatures.):

In 2006 (Three years before his death about a month ago,) he was diagnosed with an eye disease that leads to blindness. I don’t think that there’s anything that can make an artist feel worse than a disability that could interfere with his ability to draw.

This post is a tribute to this prolific caricaturist and his art. His caricatures and his confident line-work will continue to inspire us.