MercyMe sort of like Aerosmith … uhh, let me explain

Hey folks, Good news! The outstanding band MercyMe is coming to Huntington, meaning there’s an opportunity have some fun in caricature. As I’ve posted before a little seminar on the process (see my Jan 17—18 postings) where I used the band Aerosmith as my example. I’ve been a fan of MercyMe for a while now and although they don’t look anything like Aerosmith, their faces are dynamic and interesting enough to put together a fun illustration. Check out the photo of the band. Compared each face to the next one and note what about each face makes it different from the next — head shape, eyebrows, nose size, etc. The most even-featured is, perhaps, guitarist Mike Scheuchzer (far left). Also, in regards to Barry (shaved head) it’s not good in an illustration like this to just draw a hairless guy and have it assumed to be Barry. The challenge is to make him recognizable as Barry, even with hair — or better, a hat.
But the main problem with doing a caricature of a band with this many members (6) is trying to give each face equal size and space. In the Aerosmith, it was less problematic because the composition with the five members is less blocky.
Check out the caricature I did some time back of Diamond Rio who have equal members (6). While still rendering the bodys as secondary to the heads, I staggered them to give a more interesting composition. However, this time with MercyMe, I’m going to try to make the overall composition within the image flow even better by varying the head sizes a little.
More on this later.