Is it cheating if....

If you want to know how to draw look at Rembrandt, not a viewfinder.
http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_drawings_start.htm

blockend said:

Drawings from photographs tend to lack the slight binocular distortions and visceral response to 3-dimensional objects in space that make drawing from life so compelling.

Click to expand...

wouldnt a photographic print have the same drawbacks? Or would the enlarger lens somehow cancel out distortions of the camera lens? (No sarcasm intended here. That's a real question, because I dont know )

blockend said:

If you want to know how to draw look at Rembrandt, not a viewfinder.
http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_drawings_start.htm

Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. I'm a fan of Rembrandt


I did attempt to make a sketch on a 9x12 sketchpad sheet. I had some pvc pipe laying around, so I made a big easel type structure and attached a sheet of foam board to it and then taped the sheet to the foam board. Then I tilted my enlarger to the vertical position and aligned the board as good as I could to the enlarger lens with my laser aligner thing. I made a vine charcoal sketch; I couldnt do much detil because the "easel" was kinda wobbly. The charcoal sketch has an Edgar Degas look to it, which is fine by me since I like Degas. The whole process was a lot of trouble, though, and I think I might be better off using prints as a guide instead of tracing.

BTW, I used the pvc pipe easel so I could project the image bigger. I wanted to do a little cropping, and I thought the bigger image would make it easier to trace since I could better see the details. In reality, the light falloff made the details harder to see than the smaller image projected on the baseboard

"What you may find, in any case, is that once you have traced out many images from projected photographs, you will be able to do the same free-hand anyway."

-Thats not always the case. That all depends on whether you are inciteful enough to -understand- what you are copying. For instance, a child will draw a house with squares and triangles. But when you understand how perspective distorts the lines, you can draw a realistic building with nonparallel lines. The same goes for people. If you copy an image you may not understand the proportions of the face vs. the head. Anatomy classes can be very helpful in understanding the bones and muscles under the skin.

blockend said:

Hyper-realist enthusiasts in the 1970s exactly reproduced colour transparencies on large canvases, it turned out to be a visual dead-end. Drawings from photographs tend to lack the slight binocular distortions and visceral response to 3-dimensional objects in space that make drawing from life so compelling.

Click to expand...

Eh? I call bull-puckey. Any 2-dimensional drawing is going to look the same with one eye or two.The real reason they never succeeded was 1. their work was boring and soul-less. 2. people expect a painting to look like a painting, not a photograph.

..Just had a funny thought. what if you used a holga image as the basis for your drawing...

Existing Light said:

wouldnt a photographic print have the same drawbacks? Or would the enlarger lens somehow cancel out distortions of the camera lens? (No sarcasm intended here. That's a real question, because I dont know )

Click to expand...

A lens will take in a subject all at once. Tracing the image will give you near perfect line drawing of an image taken with a photographic lens. It's a different experience to what we see in 3-D, especially with a pencil or brush to reproduce it.

The link has an example of what I'm talking about. The image is 'wrong' by conventions of perspective but not by those of drawing. Since photography cornered the visual reportage end of image making in the mid-C19th there is no necessity for photo like drawings, just as pictorialism was an attempt to give photographs artistic respectability by making them smudgy and impressionistic. There's nothing morally wrong with either approach and as I said previously, it's an interesting experiment but I responded to your idea of 'cheating'.
So long as you're not passing off a tracing as an example of life drawing - which anyone who knew their subject would spot immediately - cheating doesn't enter into it.

Dead Link Removed

darinwc said:

..Just had a funny thought. what if you used a holga image as the basis for your drawing...

Click to expand...

I do have a Holga, so it's very possible I could... next time I have some 120 film on hand. I've been pretty much working primarily with a pentax k1000 for about a year now, but a Holga neg or slide is a possibility

I've also been contemplating using deliberate misalignment of the lens and easel to play with the perspective. I mentioned I likedthe Degas-like style of my first sketch, so the detail I get with a perfectly aligned and focused easel really isnt a concern as long as I can see what I'm doing.

This whole idea has evolved from "what if I did this?" a few days ago to "I've got the basics of this down. Now how can I use this to get what I want?" I might be better off working from prints when I use negatives, but this projection method might be better suited for slides (black and white negs reversal processed) unless I want to figure out how to reversal process paper


I'm sure everyone reading this has figured out I dont really care about photo realism too much with these drawings/paintings. I'll leave the photo realism to my prints and slides. Outside of the photography world, I'm a fan of the Impressionists and expressionist painters. Somehow I'm going to try to figure a way to transfer these photographs in to some sort of Impressionist expressionist kind of drawing or painting. At least, that's my goal for now. Ask me again tomorrow and I'll have another goal in mind

You may want to have a look at futurism and vorticism which, among other things, were an attempt to portray movement in time and space.

If it was good enough for da Vinci, it's good enough for us.