Jax Teller caricature

I often do caricatures, usually I use peoples birthdays as excuses to do them as they are very time consuming, sometimes taking a full five days to do. 
But they always start with a rough sketch, these sketches are often incredibly scrappy and might have taken just a few seconds to do but they are the most important part of any caricature because to me that act as skeletons for whats to come. 

At the moment I am working on a caricature of Charlie Hunnam as Jax Teller. My friend who the caricature is for is a fan of the TV series Sons of Anarchy. I started off drawing Jax but after a few sketches I felt it wasn't quite working out.

The aim of a caricature is to exaggerate the features of a subject. But with Charlie Hunnam, he does possess a slightly rugged attractiveness about him. So yes it is important that his features are exaggerated e.g. eyes that are quite close together, but this needs to be achieved in a subtle way so you don't lose his handsomeness in the caricature.

So I began drawing other members of the cast. To be honest, I thought it would be a piece of cake. These guys are the most recognisable set of characters I have seen in a TV show so I felt that because they've all got features that can be heavily exaggerated that they'd be easy to caricature, but what I found was entirely the opposite.

I didn't feel the sketches were so bad but because these guys are so recognisable, the features I hadn't got quite right were instantly noticeable.

After a lengthy detour I went back to Jax. After a short period I abandoned the caricature I had been editing on Photoshop to try to get right (an example of putting the carriage before the horse) and began working from a different photo.
                                                

This photo was a better one to work from because it was more recogniseably him as his whole head was in shot (caricaturist Tom Richmond says the most important part of a caricature is the head shape). With his whole head in shot I realised what I should have been exaggerating. Not only are his eyes close together but his whole face is rather close together wheras his head is basically normal size. The idea was to exaggerate that negative space around his face.

Above is my final caricature.  I feel after I approached the same subject with a fresh perspective I was able to create a far better caricature than if I had just kept with the first attempt and tried to make it work through colouring.