It's notoriously difficult (for men at least) to caricature beautiful women. This experiment concerned a wide range of drawing styles and mediums in order to find something that might work. To begin my epic quest, I collated a couple of A3 sheets of drawings of ladies I'd drawn over the various meetings to use as reference:
There was a nice quote by a journalist during Royal Ascot about how women's dress at the races can be pure female self-caricature. A big part of getting the right feel of the racing crowd is to get the clothes right. The illustrator Alyana Cazalet has some nice work which treads a line between fashion illustration and comic observation:
Her use of bright colour painted on quite loosely (perhaps at the beginning?) is a good trick to use with clothes. I tried this with some of the characters and outfits I'd observed:
This drawing done at Cheltenham in November didn't really need caricaturing - the ladies I observed have enough character already, but i couldn't resist:
Some drawings done in a more simplified style of some mummies I'd seen at one of the meetings:
I discovered a nice unfinished drawing from the Festival of a pair of ladies - who I took to be authentic horse enthusiasts - sitting on a bench and doing some form study:
I thought I'd work on extending the caricature:
I put them into a scene here, though I couldn't be bothered with any other spectators:
To continue with the theme of groups and interaction, I had a look at some work by cartoonist/ caricaturist Sue Macartney Snape, no stranger to drawing upper-class women, and not afraid of sexy either (n.b. especially the last two):
Macartney Snape's tools are exaggeration of figure (Ronald Searle's skinny legs included), comically emphasised clothes, bright colour and insightful facial expression - her faces carry real personality. One of the interesting things about her work is that it is satire aimed very much at a particular class - they are both targets and consumers.
I did a couple of sheets of studies drawn in pen and ink with some brushwork of a rough cross section of the racing crowd, from young to old:
These are OK but I feel a bit 'generic', and could do with some colour and further development - see the next experiments.
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