I am trying to put together a list for my portrait students of ways to make a drawing from a photo look good. I don't work with photos, but my students want to..so heres what I came up with

1. Don't strive to draw photographically...strive to draw artistically. Look at drawings you like (Michaelangelo, Degas, to name a few) and try to use some of the technique the artist you admire did. If you like red chalk drawings by Waterhouse, try doing a piece in red chalk. Take what you like from any artist and put it into your work.

2. Choose a good photo. Make sure there is a sense of light and shadow. It is hard to work from "studio" photos and have them look natural (especially very posed pictures of children). Bad lighting on a photo will usually equal a bad drawing.

3. Take time to analyze the pose of the person in the photo. Don't just copy the 2 dimensional. Think about how that is a 3 dimensional head in space. Imagine you are sculpting that head. Try to think about the forms as if you could touch them.

4. Allow yourself to warm up before jumping right in to working on a long piece from a photo. Do some "gesture drawings" from the photo. Try to get the essence of the pose and the emotion. Make some thumbnails to show composition. When you are ready to work on the final piece...PLAN YOUR DRAWING. There is nothing worse than starting from the eyeball and realizing you can't fit the head on the page! Start with a plan.


That's what I have so far..any advice welcome...

I have had a couple of heated discussions with many people around here about beauty. I will put it simply: I love things that are beautiful. And by that I don't mean just a beautiful girl or something historically beautiful. It can be anything.

I was looking at some works by Dennis Miller Bunker today, and I was entranced by the way he painted light on a teapot. It was amazing, slithering lines of light and shadow. It was sensual. It was everything an abstract painter might strive for but at the same time representational of a time and place and subject.

A good painting (or drawing) gives me chills. I want to drink it in..I want to be in the moment of that painter painting that piece. It gives me faith in humanity.

This entry was sparked by a forum post about how some people are sick of "academic" pieces of work. I found this passage in Harold Speeds "The Practice and Science of Drawing" that I think is pertinent.



" It is difficult to explain what is wrong with an academic drawing, and what is the difference between it and a fine drawing. But perhaps this difference can be brought home a little more clearly if you will pardon a rather fanciful simile. I am told that if you construct a perfectly fitted engine-the piston fitting the cylinder with absolute accuracy and the axles their sockets with no space between &c. - it will not work, but be a lifeless mass of iron. There must be enough play between the vital parts to allow some movement; "dither"...It has always seemed to me that the accurately fitting engine was like a good academic drawing, in a way a perfect piece of workmanship, but lifeless. Imperfectly perfect, because there was no room left for the play of life. And to carry the simile further, if you allow too great a play between the parts, so they fit one over the other too loosely, the engine will lose power and become a poor rickety thing.



Everyone should check out his drawing book and his painting book as well.

the sky is blue
it's beautiful and so are you

SO
I decided to take this grant thing as a learning experience. They said in their rejection letter that we could request a copy of what the judges said about our work.

Wanna know what they said???

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Apparently they made NO comments on my work.


Well thank you. That really helps me in my artistic career.

They had NOTHING to say. And these are the people giving the grants??! They had months and months to come to their decisions, and yet couldn't take the time out to give ANY criticism or advise??

I will tell you what makes me mad. Seeing some of the stuff they gave grants to yet they don't have the balls to tell me they don't like my work because it's TRADITIONAL.

I am holding back the expletives.