A Humbling Experience

This is my entry for this month's caricature competition. All the entries may be found here. I found this to be a very humbling experience for the following reason: I began this task by searching for an image of Jim Broadbent that really appealed to me. Having found one I set to with pencil and paper and started drawing in the time-honoured tradition of looking at the subject, looking at the sheet of paper and wondering where the hell I make the first graphite smudge. Actually, I tend to start with the glazz-balls, they being the windows to the soul and all that. Having finished the pencils I scanned the image into Photoshop and started "inking" with the Bamboo tablet (kiss kiss kiss - I love my Bamboo tablet!). The finished result has already been laid before you. Left, left - it's over to the left. That's Jim Broadbent, that is.
Now then, why all this verbose preamble? Why all this circumlocutory loquaciousness? Why all the blather? Because, well, look at it. Look at my effort and then compare it with all the other entries - especially the winning entry by Malcolm McGookin. Where I struggled, panted, sweated and gasped to achieve a passing resemblance of a fine actor, everybody else did what was asked of them, which was to produce a caricature (dictionary definition = A pictorial representation of a person, which exaggerates his characteristic traits for comic effect.).
It may well be a steep learning curve for thine truly, but if I had known it was going to be this bloody steep I would have requested a Tibetan sherpa - or, indeed, a yak. You can ride a yak, can't you? Okay, I'll take a yak. Riding piggy-back on a sherpa would merely be a graphic illustration of Western imperialism riding on the back of an oppressed nation struggling under the yoke of.... etc. (To be continued in Marx and Cartoon Allegories: A Cartoonist's Sourcebook by Che Lenin).