How To Draw Lifelike Portraits From Photographs Pdf Download
Kenneth Calimlim
This book will take you right from the very beginning, starting with drawing tools and shading techniques, to individual lessons on each facial feature, different types of hair, and even how to draw clothes!
Lee Hammond quickly teaches you how to add the illustration of three-dimensional highlights and shadows to simple shapes using pencil shading and blending. After you've got the basics down, you'll learn how to use the same techniques to portray every feature of the human face. You'll also discover how to figure out what the features of your photographed model really look like so you can draw them from different angles. Then Hammond shows you how to put all those features together to create a lifelike portrait that truly captures the individuality of your subject.
It was this mixture of frustration for drawing portraits and my admiration for people who could do it well, that inspired me to try tackling it in an ultralearning project. I felt that if I could learn to draw faces well, that would not only teach me important artistic skills, but give me confidence that I could then apply to future artistic projects.
The hardest part of drawing faces is that our brains are wonderful facial-recognition machines. If an eye is even a few millimeters off of the position its supposed to occupy, we get a strange sense that something is wrong. An expression can go from content to bored with only a few line widths of difference.
Around the middle of the project, my technique for doing finished portraits, had become fairly well established. I would draw the head, attempt to place the features roughly, look at it, make a guess where things needed to be adjusted, erase those features, redraw them and repeat.
The last part of the project had me continue to focus on the Vitruvian methods for doing finished portraits. I stopped doing the fast line drawings and focused on trying to get comfortable with the process as taught.
In the beginning, this method seemed so different from my prior approach, that it almost felt like my line drawing practice was a waste. What was the point of guessing where features lay if there was a method for placing them exactly?
However, as I reached the end of the project, I found there was a nice fusion between the two approaches. The triangulation technique and methodical approach to drawing portraits as taught in that course gave me a good first step in positioning things. But, ultimately, the ability to see a likeness and know where things needed to be adjusted was invaluable as a complementary skill. Using both of them meant I could get more accurate results than either alone.
But if you find yourself ending up with weird-looking animals or portraits that have lopsided eyes or heads that are way too big for the bodies, this process of mapping out your composition might help make your drawings look more real:
Drawing from life is difficult, often requiring extreme patience and practice, but it's still very possible to create a beautiful portrait overtime. With the right techniques, tools, and observational skills, you can learn to draw a masterpiece!
This talk speaks to contradictions and lacunae in claims made about a "South African Photography" as it is defined in recent writing by photographers and historians. We here now know about South Africa in large part from seeing its well-traveled apartheid-era social documentary photography. On its own, this archive of images is not adequate in two respects. For viewers abroad it does not reflect the range of lived historical experience in South Africa. And it tells us little about how specific kinds of photographic images have been seen and understood in South Africa itself. Is a singular global interpretation possible for these images? Are global histories inevitably unstable ones, dependent upon other shifting histories of images at each new site of reception in each location and time? This talk approaches such questions by focusing primarily on how the local significance and even the contents of what is now understood (through a common narrative) to be a "South African photography" have been preceded, informed, and supplemented by other types of pictures in other media over time. My examples include 1930s portraits of "native life," 1950s photojournalism from the magazine Drum, and anti-apartheid images from the 1980s, along with contemporary imagery in painting and graphic art.
The session focused on photography, as an image making procedure, which reached East Asia close to the time of the first experimentations and its commencement in Europe, in the mid- 19th century. This was a unique opportunity to take part in the shaping of the field by artists across East Asia who took an interest in the newly introduced medium. In doing so, many of these practitioners added to the developing language of photography, contributing from their respective aesthetic vocabulary, drawing from particular visual cultures, adding to technical and conceptual developments of the field. Photography, therefore, developed as a truly transcultural medium, with contributions from different cultures that melded together to shape its discourse.
This paper examines how traditional emotional and poetic tropes in China were explored with the new possibilities brought by art photography through a case study of Pan Dawei (1880 1929). A leading art photographer, talented painter, dramatist, and social refor-mer, Pan is best known for his heroic burial of the revolutionaries who died in the Guangzhou uprising against the Qing Dynasty (1644 1911) in 1911. Among his many photographs featuring symbols of death, the photographs of skull particularly demonstrate his invention of new visual vocabularies that highlight the formal and epistemological characters of the photographic media. The rich formal and iconographical references in his works can hardly be reduced to a binary model of East versus West. Instead, visual sources from local customs, political events, and other art forms constituted multilayered parameters, within which Pan produced photographs with blunt components of death while at the same time retaining ambiguity in their meanings.
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