Do You Draw From Life?

If Not, You’re Doing Yourself a Disservice

Are you drawing from life? (Photo credit: 123RF.com Image ID: 39635406 Copyright: pressmaster)

Do you draw from life? If you do, bravo! If not…why not? I understand the convenience of Google these days. You can look up reference images for whatever you want. And there’s nothing wrong (in my opinion) with working with reference photos. I do it all the time with my animal portraits. But there are advantages to drawing from life that you don’t get from using a two dimensional photo.

First of all, what are the benefits from drawing from a photo? Well, first and foremost for me, the subject doesn’t move around. Even if I could draw to the caliber of my pet portraits in just five minutes, have you tried getting your pets to sit still for that long, much less retain that expression? Also, the lighting in a photo doesn’t change, reflections don’t change, weather isn’t an issue (if you’re doing landscapes), and if you don’t finish your drawing in one sitting, the photo won’t change.

So What’s the Problem?

All of those things sound pretty great, right? So why bother with trying to draw from life? Why not Google what you’re looking for or go out and take a photo of what you want? Primarily, even with the most high-tech, high-res camera, distortion takes place. It’s impossible for it to not happen. You’re taking something that’s three dimensional and flattening it out into a two dimensional photo. When you do that, several things happen.

• Perspective becomes slightly skewed
• Spatiality (the relationship between objects) becomes distorted
• Dimension of objects and people become distorted
• Color almost never matches real life
• Value almost never matches real life

Why Your Eyes Reign Supreme

Visual acuity is one of an artist’s greatest tools. If you’re not honing this skill you’re only doing yourself a disservice. Nothing can truly replace seeing something for yourself. For example, if you’re drawing a person’s portrait, only your eyes can distinguish all of the subtle plains, variations in color, and value on that persons face. While a camera on the other hand will lose much of that detail.

A photo will always flatten an image. Space and perspective can become distorted. (Photo credit: 123RF.com Image ID: 21673639 Copyright: 1markim)

Perspective and spatiality can go hand in hand. When you’re physically in a space observing what’s around you, you see perspective and spatiality as they truly are. A photo will always flatten it. For example, in the photo above, how far behind the man in front is the lady in red? Two feet? Five feet? What about the man in the back?

Color and value will always be distorted by cameras. It is the nature of the beast. I don’t understand all of the technical details, but in a nutshell it has to do with the camera simplifying what it sees into basic RGB. It will basically try to assign the closest matching color in its ‘pallet’, which isn’t necessarily what you see. Have you ever tried to take a picture of a stunning sunset and found that what you got wasn’t as stunning as the real thing? It’s also why nobody can ever get an accurate photo of the Northern Lights.

So while in some cases (like mine), it is nearly unavoidable to work with anything but a photo, I do suggest breaking routine and making it a regular exercise to try and draw from life. It doesn’t have to be a full blown masterpiece. Sketches will do. It’s more about training your visual acuity and observation skills. And for an artist, why wouldn’t you want that?