Caricature of Kimi Räikkönen - crashes a downhill car

As an illustrator I've always been especially fascinated by caricatures. Most probably I'm not alone. During my illustrator career I've had some caricaturing jobs, but I have never had it on my to-do list to really practice my caricaturing skill to professional level. Also, what I have been unhappy about, is that I never seem to have time to do so called "just for fun" illustrations. Some time last summer I finally realized that the problem is merely my attitude than my schedule.

Anyway, after having such a remarkable insight I finally decided to illustrate something "just for fun", and as caricatures are so fun (and challenging) to do, why not doing one. But who to choose? I wanted him/her to be a finnish person, one that is also known abroad. They are not that many :) And I ended up choosing Kimi Räikkönen, the former F1 world champion driver. He is an interesting person, and I also thought that he would neither be too easy nor too difficult to make a caricature of.

I first started to make sketches in Adobe Illustrator. As I'm not a pro caricaturist, I really liked the possibility to move individual face parts little by little trying to find the right place for them. It's also nice to take duplicates of different steps of work. Comparing these steps helped me to find out which way to go.



In the end it turned out not to be a comfortable way for me to work and I dug up my pens and sketch pad. That way it was much faster to work, and I finally started to realize what's the clue of Kimi's face, the worrying eyes and the pointy nose.



Back to digital, and now it was easier to put everything together. Unfortunately at this stage I suddenly got too much other stuff to do and I had to put the fun aside to wait for better days...



Finally, couple of months ago, I was able to get back to this project. Now that I already had the face, it was time to sketch the rest of the caricature. In normal situation this would have been the first stage. To make him drive a car was quite an obvious resolution.





It was only because of an interesting composition that I chose to illustrate him having a car crash. And the downhill car was more fun and less serious to have a car crash with.



It wasn't easy and it took time, but it was fun and I'm quite happy with it. Let's see who's the next victim...