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I am a staunch proponent of painting from reference photos as well. When I began using oils about twelve years ago I made my daughter pose for me, and the portrait, while a good likeness, was bland and flat-looking. Later I began using photo references and loved the spontaneous and fresh look I was able to get from my subjects with this technique, and I would never go back to working from life. On the other hand I carry a sketchbook to meetings and other places where I have to sit for prolonged periods of time and often sketch from life in those environments. I believe that in order to be able to paint meaningfully from photos you must have extensive experience drawing from life; otherwise how can you extrapolate from the sometimes very incomplete information offered by a photo, and how can you convey a sense of three-dimensionality if you've never sketched those curves from the three-dimensional?
When I do a posthumous commission I ask for as many photos of the person as the client can amass for me, so I can get a better sense of the individual I'll be painting. This fleshes the subject out for me and allows me to interpret his or her personality much better.
I have also painted from others' photos two other times, each time when the finished work was intended to be a surprise. In both cases I also knew the subject, very well in one case and somewhat in the other, so I could supplement the photos with my own knowledge. In the second case, painting our governor and his wife, the reference photo was old and I had to use my memory of him and some more recent photos to bring his face up to date. Otherwise I take two or three rolls of 24-exposure film of the subjects, outside in natural lighting, avoiding the mid-day so that the lighting is more interesting. My specialty is "portraits in a natural setting" so that environment works well for the finished piece.
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Threaded Mode
