Drawing From Reference

drawing from reference?

Drawing from a photograph rather than from an object in front of you. Usually quicker and sometimes cheaper than drawing from observation. The point of drawing from reference is not to copy the image in the photograph but to understand the information in the image, perhaps for future use for example drawing a photograph of Sean Bean from a reference photo will help you get your head around his facial features - from which you could then create a caricature or some other recreation.

images 1&2

The task of doing 4 drawings from one reference images was a great exercise as it made me able to reflect upon what I didn't like in the first drawing and change it for the next ones. As you can see my first two images are the most different from each other and I think they were the least successful as I hadn't quite figured out where everything went so the positioning on the page isn't great.

reference image

The third drawing I did was my most successful, the textured brush strokes gave the image a more comfortable look, the others have a kind of 'concentrating on trying to copy the image too much' feel to them but the third was very natural. Since the 'sketching' was done in a much lighter ink I find the 'outline' of the face draws less attention. I think the fourth image didn't look as good as the third because I tried to re-use the same technique so my focus wasn't on the drawing completely. 

extra crazy image

The four I originally did were all fairly 'realistic' so for a bit of fun I did a more stylised image, mapping out shapes of the face. Only about 5 minutes was spent on this, as it was just a test but it looks pretty cool. I think it'd be interesting if I had done the whole image. 

One thing I wish I had tried was filling in the negative space instead of sketching out the subject.