Everyone should choose the right way for themselves. For me, drawing and painting without the aid of photos is the goal to strive for. Drawing and painting antidate the age of photography and are different disciplines. They are “ancient” practices, the product of the meticulous coordination of hand and eye; they involve skills that surpass the tracing or copying of photographs and that require years of hard work and training. Sadly, many of these skills are no longer taught in art schools.

If I may add a personal note: I learned drawing not by copying photos but by studying and copying old masters’ drawings. In doing so, one gets a sense of the “grammar” of drawings, what lines to use to suggest form and one starts to appreciate the sheer difficulty of it all. The “photographic eye” is all around us and it’s great to make an escape from it…

(Would the Impressionists have come up with their color theories by studying photos? I think not. And I’d even hazard the theory that their return to nature was a reaction to the medium of photography.)

Yes, those live models can be expensive. Especially the young one crying in your most recent post.

In principle, drawing from a photo would be optically equivalent to drawing from the original scene using one eye fixed at the location of the camera lens. But, in fact, we experience the world and understand its 3D-ness by moving our head and using the stereo capability of our two eyes. Simplifying the richness of the full experience is what’s hard; much of that simplification has already been accomplished by making a photograph. To be sure, there are still a lot of choices in drawing from a photo, and it still involves plenty of manual skill. Nevertheless, the task of reaching a given final result is, I think, quite a bit easier.

If it is the artist making the photograph, then he or she is still responsible for major decisions like perspective and composition. But it’s still a shortcut to let the camera help with the 2D rendering. No that there’s anything wrong with that; I’m sure I would do it myself, although where possible I think I would prefer to use the photo as an aid, rather than work only from the photo.

Thanks for the feed-back. Could you give an example of what you have in mind? My comments were meant to be more general, going back to “ancient” drawing and painting practices, as taught in the renaissance and the baroque (in Italy and Flanders), as well as in the 19th century (French academy). The assumption then was that less artistic expertise was needed to copy from prints (our photos) than from nature directly (sculpture, then later models and so on).

Antonia

Speaking of the single perspective matter: I would add that, the farther away something is, the more fixed the perspective becomes. Every little twitch in a close-up situation can produce a different perspective. On the other hand, celestial objects billions of light years away, are perspective proof: there’s simply no way that you can get another angle on them. The photograph taken of such an item is all you can have. Our discussion resides somewhere in between.

Also, the celestial object is composition-proof for the same set of reasons.

I would like to know if any among us sketch directly from the landscape motif. Somewhere along the line I picked up a video called Canyon Dreams. Some of the sequences are speed-ups in which clouds morph giddily and shadows surf across the contours of the Grand Canyon. (Yes, Morph Giddly was and is a musician). To sit and render that might be tough. Have to call in the Constable.

Finally, what do you think of drawing from a stereoopticon or a hologram?