Caricature Sketch

Reference application for caricatures

Caricature is a picture or description of a concrete object by exaggerating the characteristics of the object, usually the object is human face. The word caricature comes from the Italian word caricare, which means giving or exaggerating. Caricature describes a known subject and is generally intended to cause humor for those who know the subject. Caricature is distinguished from cartoons because caricatures do not form stories like cartoons, but caricatures can be an element in cartoons, for example in editorial cartoons. People who make caricatures are called caricatures.

Caricature as it is known now comes from 16th century Italy. In the 18th century, caricatures reached the wider community through print media and, especially in England, had become a means of social and political criticism. Aside from being a form of art and entertainment, caricatures have also been used in the field of psychology to examine how humans recognize faces.

In making caricatures, caricatures make observations to determine the characteristics that make the subject different from others, and overestimate these characteristics. For this reason, caricature compares the face of the subject to the face of the average person, and exaggerates the differences. For example, if the subject of caricature has a longer nose than the average person, the image of the nose of the subject in the caricature will be much longer. However, how exaggerated these characteristics often depend on the drawing style of each caricature.