is drawing from life really that much better than drawing from photos? why or why not?
I wanted to ask a similar thing: is doing a portrait from life a bad idea if the lighting is not that of a life drawing class / photo quality, when starting out?
>>2293842
Yes, it is. Actually having a model in a three-dimensional space makes a huge difference. Whenever I attand croquis/life-drawing, the methods I use at the computer all dissapear, and I draw in an entirely different way. It may just be me, but I'd say that it's different.
>>2293842
drawing from life is the point of professional study, actually.
Yes life drawing is much better. Like >>2293855
said, because the subject is more tangible, the way you draw kind of changes.
>>2293873
>professional study
What? Is that like getting paid to do studies?
>>2293842
That you aren't fighting with the built-in distortion of a camera lens is the biggest advantage I would say. A well-shot photo with a proper focal length and good exposure isn't terrible though.
>>2293884
animation companies and schools will put their animators through life drawing classes to improve their gestures and ability to make things look life-like
I improve the most from life drawing. Still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and figure drawing in life has helped more than the time ive spent drawing from photo reference. Sadly It is pretty fucking hard to practice from it soley since classes/sessions are expensive.
>>2294539
Well they used to back in the days of McCay anyway.
the answers in here are kind of nebulous. Hopefully I can shed some light from my experience. I'm only going to talk about value drawings, but this all extends to color.
The first thing is lack of constraint. If you don't like the composition, you can walk around the subject and get a different angle. You can adjust lighting, etc.
Second is that life has an infinite amount of detail, limited by what your eyes can pick up from that distance. Part of deal here is that you have to observe what you see and translate it from 3d to 2d. But there's more to it than that. Most of the time when referring to life drawing, you're talking about a 20min-3hour pose. This isn't enough time to capture all of the details, for any artist. Seriously, getting everything in that amount of time is impossible. However, you can and MUST make choices about what you do express and how you express it.
When you draw from life you interpret an infinite amount of information through deliberate use of a limited medium. You look at something, figure out it's form and texture, then figure out how the light/shadow is describing that to you, and THEN you have to fucking translate that into black and white, laying down color. Whether you're aware of it or not, you are making decisions about whether you're better off using an outline here to show a crease, or just the implication of line with some shadow to illustrate some nuance of the hip over there. You're forced into choices and decisions and it's a fucking overwhelming amount of information.
To get proportions accurate (at least as a beginner, before your eye is well trained enough for direct-drawing) you have to observe main masses and shadow shapes carefully, excising subordinate detail until later. How far up you work the detail will depend on your time limit- which you must always keep in mind as you transcribe the ocean of data in front of you.
drawing from photos is bad. it doesn't teach you anything.
master copies are what you should do and don't even try to tell me otherwise.
if you aren't doing master copies of other people's drawings you should be drawing from life.
>>2294672
with a photograph, perspective is locked and figured out for you. texture, form, all of it is already transcribed to 2d, there is no choice. You can decide to change shit, but that's different than choosing between two of infinite options.
With a photo, you can ignore everything except the arrangement of black and white. Even then, you are not required to work from the general to the specific. If you're diligent, you can copy a photograph well by only focusing on each tiny detail as they appear next to one another. You can do great copies of photographs without ever understanding why the image 'works'.
Also, there are a variety of camera lenses, and they all translate perspective and proportion at least somewhat differently than the human eye. competent drawings from life will place the viewer in the same space in relation to the subject as the artist was.
It's a difficult phenomenon to describe, but photograph drawings seem 'flat' because they've been so translated, the perspective is subconsciously recognized as an unusual one. Whereas a proper life drawing of just line will create the illusion (by proportion and perspective, if not detail and rendering) that the object is 'there' no matter the angle or distance it was observed from. This is because that specific combination of angle and perspective is recognized by the human subconscious as exactly alike as the combination it experiences from its own lenses (your eyes). The subconscious cannot tell the difference and so directly observed drawing has a quality of being more 'real', even (maybe especially) if it has less insane detail than a 'hyperrealist' painting from a photograph.
>>2294682 cont
>>2294676
agreed. Even though those are already flat, you're copying the 'choices' of someone who learned to translate the infinite bombardment of the visual system into successful aesthetic. Master studies will also retain that 'phenomenon' I mentioned in the last paragraph of
>>2294682
You're observing what they observed with the same lenses, so it has that same quality. Master studies are an invaluable tool to supplementing life drawing. They'll help guide you in making your own interpretive decisions (and I don't mean abstract bullshit, I mean whether to lose lines or not, whether to use line or gradation, how to arrange value/shadows, etc.) While copying from your comp is okay, your best bet is to try to do it in person in a museum.
Drawing figure sculpture is an exquisite pleasure compared to a simple model, because the sculptor has already arranged it all for you. Seriously, it's like magic, try it. You'll generally get a better drawing off a figure sculpture you like than you will from a model.
>>2294695 cont
The following all presupposes you've reached a certain level of competence in proportion, perspective and controlling value:
It's also important to consider the nature of the object you're creating. A drawing from a photograph is just a reproduction of a single, static moment of real life that someone, maybe someone else, captured. That wasn't a moment in YOUR life, it was theirs.
If it was your life, then all the better, but it is a SINGLE static moment, that has already been captured*. A drawing from life is just that. A drawing from LIFE. YOUR life. That image does not exist anywhere else. And it isn't simply a moment- drawings take 20minutes up to hours. You're capturing a period of time. Your subject may subtly move, you may be in a certain mood, some cute grill watching you might make you nervous, the weather outside will affect the lighting. All of this motion will show in your image.
Drawing at a modeling session is cool and invaluable to building your ability, but the real meat comes when you can competently draw your friends, your family, strangers, trees, situations, all as they are right in front of you, interacting with you. Your drawing alone in a park observed a year later will transport you personally back to LIVING that day. If you had a subject and they observe it sometime later, it will move them to that period of time. You're capturing FUCKING LIFE man. It's music on paper. It doesn't need to be perfect, but if it bears decent resemblance, that is enough. The better you get, the more detail and information you manage to convey with economical choices, the more you and others will experience your drawings as a quiet symphony of that moment. A life drawing is an important object for much more than just the technical ability or work involved.
Take for comparison, a drawing from a photograph. Tightly gridded or othewise ensured of accuracy. It's a moment the photographer remembers. Just one moment, one focus in the image.
>>2294706
the only commendable thing from a good drawing from a photograph is the artists' rendering ability. While it's great that you spent three hours getting the shading on the upper lip right, even if you're many orders more gifted than Master Dynamite, that's all you did. The drawing took you 10 hours alone in a room. That's what you'll remember. And aside from your parents, no one will really care.
Even if it's a photo you took: the photo as an object will conjure the memory of the moment in life while the drawing just conjures that time alone, world outside passing you by.
*Someone will probably argue these last points with the example of doing something "creative" like drawing from a photo of soldiers and replacing their guns with bouquets, or something else equally conceptual. HOW ORIGINAL. No one will care.
I'm not saying the world will care about your life drawings. But you will. And should you be lucky enough to share those moments with a subject and capture them, they probably will too.
Anyway, I'm tired and probably not making much sense. This is a much more scattered explanation than I'd hoped. It's all just a collection of my observation and experience from the last ten or so years. I'd drawn from photographs for 4ish years when I quit because I'd heard that "lol life drawing is so much better". I committed to drawing only from life except for bridgman/master studies (on rare occasions I've worked from a photo for a gift or something).
It was unforgiving and fucking hard at first, but three years in, it is so, so worth it. I never really enjoyed the process drawing from photographs, just admiring my own skill at the end result and the attention I got from others. I did it because I was good at it. Now I do it because even though it's often still unforgiving when I fuck up, it kinda makes me feel like I'm doing something worthwhile.
But I'm some fuck spouting to strangers on a sumerian macaroni-crafts board, so what do I know?
![e3cc55c85f11a147a6ddf4c9a777b60d[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/RtWUr9G.jpg "e3cc55c85f11a147a6ddf4c9a777b60d[1].jpg")
Drawing from life allows you to get a better sense of how and why exactly the conditions of the environment you're in as well as your position relative to the subject affect the way it appears to you. Your understanding of perspective, how forms interact with one another, how light acts, and any amount of other knowledge necessary for effective painting and drawing is something that needs to constantly be refined and challenged.
Say for example your subject was a life model like pic related. You have a general concept of normal human proportions so you make some sketches and they turn out all right without more effort or observation than you're used to. Now suppose she takes a reclining pose of some sort, and you're sitting on the ground close to her feet. This causes her whole body to be extremely foreshortened, and her legs now look a little short, her torso has a weird shape and her head is obscured. Now you have to take a little more time and pay a little more attention because, obviously, you're not used to seeing people in this position. More importantly, the REASON it takes you more time this time is that your image of the model is now at odds with what understood her to look like before. Making an accurate drawing of this second, more difficult pose forces your brain to reconcile the two images and recognize that it is possible for the subject to appear that way given the viewing angle and other factors. This visual phenomenon that you did not predict will then become something that you CAN predict, and thus you will make more convincing drawings.
It's a hard concept to explain so my wording might be a little awkward, but that's generally my concept of the advantages life drawing has to copying photos.
Not OP but I have this problem where I want to be able to jjoin life drawing sessions, but those don't seem to be available at all where I live which is why I draw from photographs.
My question is, how fucked am I? How do I solve this?
>>2294738
study other people's drawings. get good that way. Also if you can't draw other people drawing your hands and doing self portraits is great practice too. you can also always do landscapes. and when you are good enough you can always ask acquaintances to pose for you.
so basically not fucked at all. just don't give up and draw from photographs constantly.
>>2294739
i know it probably doesn't sound like too much but your comment really lifted a huge weight from my shoulders and i kinda feel like i can do this shit even if i'm almost 25 and deciding to start from scratch even if i had some shitty experience that didn't really go anywhere
>>2294745
van gogh started later. im reading a book about him again, and I'm always fixated on his early years because his later years are so unattainable for me right now. it's all interesting but his early years and what he practiced to get where he was going is what I'm trying to focus on now.
he did landscapes, he did portraits, but early on he also studied and copied every bargue plate at least three times, as well as doing studies of artists he liked. I'd say that's as good as any for a place to start.
>>2293842
God, this thread is filled with some prayer circle feel-good bullshit. You can't even find an actual reason that life drawing is better or not. The singular different thing is that maybe you'll sit in the spot where you get a weird angle, so you'll draw something slightly unusual Whoopdedoo. I swear you fucks must be the ones showing up in berets thinking you're so special.
Drawing from bad quality photos is going to be worse than drawing from life. Drawing from good quality photos (Of which there are surprisingly few, even on sites dedicated to figure/gesture drawing) is going to be pretty much the same.
>>2294754
I think we met at the drawing session last week. You were the empty chair in the corner right? Have fun with your photos :)
>>2294758
>it is inconceivable that someone could have done tons of life drawing and disagree with me.
Keep deluding yourself, you arrogant failure. :)
i didn't used to feel like this but lately whenever i try to study the human body from a photo it just looks utterly bizarre to me.
i haven't done this in a while though. am i just completely out of practice or is it something else?
