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Originally Posted by Lon Haverly
I really started this subject as an experiment with my new camera for the camera's sake. Then, I thought it would be fun to paint it.
Frankly, I never paint from life, when you have all this technology at your fingertips. I would be hard pressed to find anyone who would pose for me from life, as I take a few days for the simplest of paintings.
I draw from life almost exclusively, because my sketches are brief, sketchy, impressionistic drawings.
Linda, what makes this such a dead giveaway that it is from a photograph, if you had not seen the reference photo?
And, is it not OK to work from photos in some trains of thought? Especially if they are your own?
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Hi again Lon,
There are a lot of magnificent paintings being made from photographs. There are also a lot of terrifc portrait artists who work solely from photos and do very well at it. If you search around the Forum there are a lot fo discussions about this. The artists who turn out fantastic paintings from photos tend to spend a great deal of time lighting and posing the subject. There are a lot of portrait styles out there and so it's hard to generalize.
The open-mouthed smile, the blown-out lights, the high light-shadow ratio and the hardness of your edges are all things that indicate "working from a photo". Again, not a problem for you IF this is what you're after stylistically.
You already have a big gift for translating three-dimensional form onto a two-dimensional surface. It seems to me that a large part of your own personal "language" as an artist will be lost when you chose to follow a photo and abandon working from life. It just seems to me that you're trying to silence a gift you have and I hope that you won't.