Drawing Lessons Amsterdam - Exploring Drawing Mediums

In this post I will try to offer some insights into the different media with which you can draw.  Each has pros and cons and they can be used depending on the kind of finish that you're after in your drawings.

During my Amsterdam drawing lessons I try to encourage students to get to know their materials as well as possible.  We normally begin working with pencil.  Here's my take on regular graphite pencil as a tool for drawing.

PENCIL:

There are several advantages to pencil when learning to draw.  The first is simply how familiar we are with a pencil as an instrument. It is unassuming and well known to us, and we feel comfortable using it as an every day thing.  Therefore, it poses no challenges of its own and allows the student of art to relax and focus on learning about lines, and values and other things without being intimidated by the material.

Pencils are also easy to get, easy to carry and very easy to sharpen (for the most part). The drawing precision that we can get from a finely sharpened pencil tip is unrivaled, and we can create incredibly intricate drawings.  The calligraphy from a pencil drawing can go from very fine rendering, with extremely nuanced gradations between values, to beautiful cross hatching made possible by its fine tip.

Pencils also come in a large range of softness allowing for great nuance in our use of tones aided by the tool even if the artist's hand is still not fully educated. They are cheap, easy to find and create great finished pieces or drawing studies.  They come very handy to use with small sketchbooks that we like to carry around with us all the time.

So far so good.  You would think at this point that the pencil is the perfect drawing tool and that there's no need to depart from it. However the humble pencil has some unavoidable drawbacks.

For starters, the tonal range is very nuanced, but creates what can generally be considered high-key drawings: drawings that are fairly light.  Even the darkest usable pencil, which as far as I'm aware is a 9B cannot make very dark blacks.  Sure, they can be dark enough in relation to the rest of the picture and will make for beautiful drawings, but they're nowhere near what we could call true black.

This means that the pieces created with pencil will have a quite and elegant nature to them, but they will not be particularly impacting from a distance and in my opinion this also hinders the size of pieces that can or should be created with pencil.

What is more, using pencils in the high B's, which are the softer and blacker kind is far from ideal in my view.  Getting a really dark result tends to severely irritate the paper, and the graphite creates a very reflective dark, which is the worse dark you can aim for.   Also, I've tried many different ways to sharpen 8B pencils and the tip just keeps braking inside the sharpener or by the pressure of the blade, which means your high B pencils typically end up with a daft tip, defeating the entire idea of using pencils in the first place.

Because of the nature of the medium pencils will also be quite poor, in my opinion, at creating highly organic-feeling drawings.  The result tends to usually be quite clinical and often "cold". They are also not an ideal tool for learning to draw in a tonal manner, and favor the use of line.

 VINE CHARCOAL

This is a great medium too and its almost a polar oposite of pencils.  Vine charcoal are sticks of charcoal made from the vine tree.  There is also willow charcoal and as far as I can tell the main difference is how soft and powdery the sticks are.

Sometimes the sticks will be fairly straight as if manufactured, and others there will be quite some bending on them.

During my Amsterdam drawing classes, students will experiment with vine charcoal about 6 or 7 lessons in, once they've learned the basics of line, tone and edge.

This medium is extremely forgiving and fun to work with. You can toss it around the paper adding some tone here and deleting there.  It's a very tonal way of working and some say that it resembles painting more than it does drawing, and I would tend to agree.  We can obtain extremely "organic" and painterly looking drawings with vine charcoal and the material allows you to obtain something very close to black if you want to.

What is more, the powder that comes from sharpening the sticks can be saved and later used to tone paper to work in an even more tonal manner, what is called substractive or negative drawing where you add tone as much as you take it away.  There is no other way to obtain such results.

The ability to throw the powdery material around in such forgiving manner is unique to vine charcoal and when looking for expressive abstract and experimental results on a drawing I believe this is the best way to go.

Large formats welcome this medium quite well and the expressive fresh thick lines that can be achieved with it are quite unique.

There are, as with pencil, some downsides to the material.  The biggest one as far as I'm concerned is the fact that vine charcoal needs to be fixated onto the paper once the drawing is finished, or it would only take the swipe of a finger to obliterate the drawing.  The powder sits fresh on the paper and you must spray a glue fixative to make it permanent.  The fixative doesn't smell great and I suspect is also not very environmentally friendly.

What the fixative does do is allow you to add more layers later on and get darker blacks, though in my experience this distorts the value relationships you had previously achieved.

Additionally you looks a lot of precision compared to pencil.  Though the vine charcoal sticks can be sharpened with a normal pencil sharpener, they wear so quickly its not too practical, although I've been able to get quite a bit of precision this way, its never close to what you can do with pencil.  The medium is not meant for it.  Willow charcoal is impossible to sharpen and every attempt will result in a broken tip stuck inside the sharpener which is extremely irritating when you have a model posing and time ticking by.

This means that in general, formats A4 and smaller are not ideal for charcoal, and because of the need for fixing, neither is a sketchbook.

Vine charcoal is also more difficult to find as your typical stationary store will not carry it and you need a real art supplies store to procure it.


CHARCOAL PENCIL

The charcoal pencil is somewhat of a hybrid between the regular pencil and the vine/willow charcoal.

It comes in a pencil form but the medium inside it is made of compressed black charcoal.  Its a fantastic tool because it comes in several grades of hardness allowing for a spectacular tonal range, which while not as nuanced as pencil can get both great precision and incredibly dark blacks, which I think go darker than vine charcoal.

The pencil can be easily sharpened with both a sharpener or a single edge blade and the tip can be brought to a very fine end.  It is fairly easy to manipulate given that it resembles the pencil so much.

On the downside, it is less easy to erase compared to vine charcoal and its marks tend to be a bit more sticky and permanent on the paper.

There is a variant to this type of pencil which can offer very nice results which is the use of red or sepia Conte pencil, which has color in addition to the properties mentioned above.

Hope this gives you some understanding of the materials.

Cheers from Amsterdam!

Amsterdam drawing lessons - back to the drawing board

In my Amsterdam drawing lessons I try to emphasize the importance of drawing as the foundation for visual art, whether you aim to be a draftsman/woman, a painter, an illustrator or even a fashion designer, such as is the case with some of my students.

Since I strongly believe in practicing what you preach, I spend most of my time reinforcing my own drawing technique and only occasionally going into painting.  I consider drawing to be the training and painting to be the fun, or the event you've been waiting for.

There are a few advantages to this approach.  One of them is to build a very solid base on top of which to base your work.  If you have to constantly second guess your drawing skills, there won't be any bandwidth left in your head to make a true artistic statement if your aim is to create realist figurative art.

Secondly, your drawing practice is cheaper and more practical.  All you need to keep the skill growing and becoming second nature is to sketch and the tools are a piece of paper or notebook, pencil and eraser.  Some people prefer pen, which is also fine.  Compare that to the endeavor of painting which requires solvents, mixing, brushes, cleaning and potentially making a mess out of your clothes and the choice becomes clear.  Add to that the cost of good acrylic of oil paint (and you should always use the good ones) and your have a few good reasons to keep going back to the basics.

During my drawing classes in Amsterdam I discuss the use of materials, and I may go into some of that in a later post, but in this one I will go on a bit more about drawing vs painting.

Here are some of the portraits I created during the Portrait Month, which takes place in April at the atelier where I often paint and draw from the live model in Amsterdam.

Considering that these are portraits created in 3 hour sessions, with changing daylight, I was pleased with the colors and values that resulted from them.  More satisfying though was the fact that the drawing was very solid in each case and that I was able to pull off full color portraits in a single session, being extremely accurate regarding construction of the head and the resemblance of the models involved.

The material used in this case was Canson paper (the rough side) and Caran d'Ache pastel blocks and pencils, which are again very high in quality and give you pigments that are a pleasure to work with, as well as the ability to create layers easily given the fact that they are hard pastels, not soft.

Once the portrait month finished I retreated back to learning more about drawing and even went back to the very basics of portraiture, including the head lay-ins of the (Andrew) Loomis method, and more intense studying of the Reily method, gaining even further knowledge of constructive drawing, placing of the features, fast sketches and drawing calligraphy.

This may sound silly for someone who can already draw, but I went quite deep into methods of sharpening the charcoal pencil, different grip styles and the use of papers that I did not know about.

The key message is certainly to not underestimate the studying of the basics, nor to neglect them because you feel as if you "know enough".  Art and drawing in particular really are about the details, the understanding you gain and how you apply it by knowledge of the subject, the tools and the masters who solved problems before you.


I hope to have enough discipline to reserve some time every year to revisit these basics as I immediately see the effect they have on my work.

All the best!

Drawing lessons Amsterdam - The use of Edges

It's been quite some time since my last post, and I'm no longer teaching drawing classes in Amsterdam during the week other than weeknights.  But I thought I'd continue with the blog just to keep sharing things that I'm discovering as I go along.

The past year I devoted almost exclusively to drawing and strenthening my skills as a draftsman before trying to paint and do fancy stuff.  Last couple of months I felt like going back to painting, from life that is, and although the results are not particularly good, I do see a noticeable difference an it is all based on better draughtsmanship skills and feel for composition.

You usually learn more from your failures than from your successes, and I know most artists only like to publish the latter, so here is a painting that is overall in my opinion not a success, but from which there are nonetheless things to learn.

I decided to use it to illustrate the much neglected and yet crucial use of edges in your drawing and painting technique.  In my Amsterdam drawing lessons I teach the idea of edges very early on, usually on session 2 when we're drawing a sphere and learning about light and how to turn form.  However it us usually soon forgotten and must be constantly considered in our visual art endeavors.

The image below was a painting from a live nude model laying in front of a mirror. It was painted with Cobra water-soluble oils on an oil paper surface with fine grain.

I want to draw your attention to the use of edges to communicate texture, distance and focus in the image.  The biggest contrast in edges can be seen between the edges of the image reflected on the mirror, and the wooden yellowocre frame of the mirror itself.

Look at the edges inside the mirror. They are all vague and smoothened out. They seem blury and distant.  To compliment this effect, I made use of horizontal blending strokes, and I also made sure that the chroma (or saturation) of my colors was lower.  You can also see that the mirror contains neither the darkest dark, nor the lightest light in the image.  The values in it are compressed.

Contrast all that fuzzy feel and blury edges, with the hardest, straightest edge of the sketch, which is the mirror frame, and especially the inner side of the vertical frame on the far right.  I made that edge with a pallet knife to make it razor sharp and communicate that we're dealing with a solid artifical object. The edge brings the frame forward and pushes the fuzzy image inside the mirror back.

In reality, the image inside the mirror was as sharp as the rest of the scene, its colors, values and edges were no different.  Therefore I'm making use of all these tools to make a compositional point and guide the eye of the viewer to the real focal point.

The use of edges doesn't end there.  You can see how edges vary around the whole image getting harder as you get closer to the nude, and softer as you get away from it.  Edges are highly related to values, which is why you can see the little white frame on the top left with soft edges and barely any value difference between it, the image it holds and the wall behind it.

The nude figure itself contains a variety of edges around it, some soft, some hard and some completely lost in the background.

The white pillow under her is clearly separated from the purple cloth by a hard edge, which is the biggest light and dark contrast in the image communicating that it is nearby and drawig the eye to the middle.

This was the result of 2 sessions with the model, so nothing to be particularly proud off. Skin tones are OK, but in the end it was not the most successful painting.  However it had some good use of edges which I thought made it worth blogging abit about.

Hope this helps!

Drawing Classes Amsterdam, Finishing a Study

In my Amsterdam drawing lessons, we explore the idea of when to consider a study as finished.  In this short entry I'll try to provide you with some things to look for, as well as show you the finished charcoal piece that I was commenting on in the previous post.

It's generally accepted that the study of a final painting need not be made in the same material, and usually has less detail than the finished piece.   The purpose of making a study is to creep up on the project and solve several of the potential problems before committing to the final piece.

If you think of it in terms of what an architect does, creating a master painting is like creating a building.  You wouldn't dream of buying all the materials and putting people to work, before having a very clear idea of the blueprints, discussing different ideas with the client and exploring them, often using 3D software or miniature models.

This is the idea behind making study sketches.  Even painters with a highly spontaneous reputation as Van Gogh, created endless studies for projects that were important to them.  Having been lucky enough to visit the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I have seen the charcoal studies and a fully painted study of the Potato Eaters, one of his most famous figurative paintings.

My last post went into a bit of detail about this process and the resulting finished charcoal study of this piece is here:

I was quite pleased with the final composition, tones and general level of finish, the drawing quality being a given.

You can notice a large amount of detail work on her face which contrasts with the almost single tone nature of the sweater and the scarf.  Even the hands were not rendered, since I wanted to use them as a light element within the dark area.  The hair itself is a bit more illustrative than realistic.

So to know whether your study is finished check:

- First and foremost, is the drawing correct?
- Does the composition work or are there things you wish you would have done differently?
- Is there an attractive value abstract quality to the piece?
- Have you worked out compositional decisions about the light and edges?
- In the case of a realist piece, does it look real?

At the end of the study you should have the feeling that you have a real grip on the piece.  You could say the study may stand as a fairly finished piece in its own right.

Time to begin thinking of the painting, which I have indeed begun.  In my amsterdam art classes I try to delay using paint as much as possible because there is so much to learn about drawing, and because unless you have, paintings tend not to work.

I did not document the painting stages because I used a fairly direct method, and therefore made too much progress too quickly before the thought of documenting it hit me.

The current stage of the painting:

The areas of back-lit wall consist of nearly bare white canvas with a very light yellow gouache, as opposed to thick highlight paint.  There is plenty of detail left to drive into the ear and hands, as well as the scarf.

A major change has been the decision to make the stripes on the scarf and to break down the sweater into basic areas of light and dark.  The idea for the scarf came up when I noticed that my photo reference, as good as it was for tone and charcoal work, was terrible color-wise and gives me these very warm beetroot colors on the face, which I'm somehow trying to fix.  It was clear that the face in general would not be the main focus point in terms of color and making the scarf stripped with slightly higher chroma seemed like a good idea.

However it still puts me in the terrible position to have to invent colors for the face, and my attempts to create a cooler mixture have quickly made the face look chalky, which likely means I would have to cool everything else together with it.  I may have to accept that this simply was not a flattering light condition for the model.

Long story short, I'm not yet sure how this experiment will turn out in terms of color, thought he charcoal result is quite encouraging.

Portrait Comissions, Study Process and Painting Composition

In today's entry I will provide a little bit of insight into the process I follow when creating a piece of art, whether it is one of my Amsterdam portrait commissions, or just an original work.  Many of these techniques are discussed during my drawing lessons and painting classes, though most of what I will touch on in this post is discussed once the student has a grip on the basics and wants to start creating his or her own pieces.

The process begins with a photograph.  In the case of this painting, I found a lady sitting on a cafe corner with back light and a very interesting pose, so I made a photo of her and promised not to share it with the world.  This is the photo as originally taken, and I've blurred the face. You'll probably see it in the drawing, but I do have some integrity!

Because the taking of the photo was a bit of a difficult negotiation, I did my best to frame and shoot, while capturing the features as best as I could, given that the rest of the drawing would be fairly simple to figure out even in poor light.

The first step in creating the portrait is to decide how it will be framed.  For this I decide to use the 'rule of thirds' principle of composition where you divide the rectangular space of the painting in three equal sections both horizontally and vertically and place important features on the dividing lines.  You can see this more clearly  when I show you the cropped result with overlapping markers:

Notice how the horizontal 3rds have been neatly divided among the very dark bottom, a middle value mid section, and the back-lit top.

There are other compositional advantages that I decided to exploit as well, and which were not totally planned.  There is a strong horizontal line, as well as a scarf, which both lead the eye towards the face. Both the face and the hands are intersected by the main diagonal.  One thing I did 'plan' or noticed and which made the picture good, is that I should be able to achieve a 'mood' in this picture due to the donwcast expression, which is complimented by the back light and the fact that most dark values are grouped at the bottom.

Another happy coincidence is that my hardest edge can be easily foudn in the forehead against the back light.

Now it's time to do a quick gestural sketch to capture the pose and get a feel for it.

The purpose of a gestural sketch is to begin assessing the pose you're dealing with.  In this cake I wanted to make sure I captured that slouchy lost-in-thought gesture, and see if the composition I had framed in the photo worked well when translated to paper.

Gestural sketches can help us created an exaggerated version of the pose and here's where we take artistic license.  These sketches prevent our drawing from taking on a feel that is too stiff and sculptural.  They are a lot of fun and they can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes depending on how much detail we want to capture.

You will notice that the drawing is very rough and I was not too concerned with the facial features other than marking them in and making sure that the angle of the forehead to the chin was correct to capture the gesture of the head as a whole.

The next step is to make a more detailed study of the face.  I'm doing this to prevent my end product to look to overworked, so that my sketching can be cleaner and more direct.  It also prevents my paper from becoming worn out or irritated through too much erasing.  I never trace faces, it's important to learn how to draw them just like everything else.  This is something I'm very clear about during my Amsterdam drawing classes, and I emphasize it in the portrait commissions I create.

The expression of the face in this sketch will be crucial to make the artwork communicate the feeling I want it to.

Here you see the portrait study drawing in pencil.  It's not a perfect rendition but the line drawing is exactly what it should be.  I say the rendition is not perfect, because first I have not spent enough time sorting out the value relationships and making this a proper drawing, and secondly, the values in this face do not correspond to the values I will use in the end result.  You see for example lots of 'total white' on the face, while the final face will have 'lights' that are far darker than this.  There will be no highlights on it and even the little rim light reflection on the forehead and nose will not be the lightest notes on the drawing/painting.

After I finish this portrait sketch, I trace some line markers that will help me draw the face in the next step of the process. 

You will notice that the sketch drawing has a couple of little squares at the top right.  A couple of words about what those are:

These are called thumbnails and they are a fantastic way to test the composition of your painting while including the tones you intend to use.  The tonal structure of a painting is like it's skeleton.  A painting can be both abstract or very realistic, but it needs to have an interesting tonal structure and composition if it is to succeed.  Contrary to what most people think, color is not what makes a painting great.  Color is the icing on the cake. The cake itself is made of a good tonal structure.

Sometimes you must create quite a few different thumbnails to play around with the tones and find a winning combination.  In this case I felt the picture was already telling me what to do and only a few decisions were left.  I created the first thumbnail and it felt right.  The mood was there and the only real decision I'm faced with is just how light will I make those back lights.  Will I go to total white or will I tone it down and make it more gloomy  and dramatic?

Notice that even though the scarf and the face in the photo have lots of values, I'm trying to compress these and make a more uniform block of the whole area.  I have expressed  these uniform blocks of tone in the numbers thumbnail beneath.  This is a toning-by-numbers reminder I'm giving myself.

This is one of the great uses of the thumbnail.  It allows you to depart from the original in an attempt to achieve a stronger composition. You determine value ranges that you're allowed to use in every area of the painting and try to stick to those as much as possible.  In doing that you exercise value economy, sending a much clearer message to the viewer.

At this point you may be thinking this is all overkill.  That it is mental to go though all this trouble just to create a portrait commission.  But all this is indeed what separates an excellent result from a mediocre one.  The masterpieces we admire in museums are not the result of blind luck.  These painters plotted and schemed for weeks, sometimes months, to create amazing pieces of visual art.  No element left to chance: composition, light, subject, brushwork.  Da Vinci apparently spent weeks scouring Venice to find the face that would be the right Judas in the Last Supper.

I used to look at all these steps, studies, etc by other painters and think to myself, "what a drag, I just want to paint and make nice art".  However, as you begin to get more ambitious about the results you want, you realize the process must be broken down in stages.  You have to plan ahead, creep up to the painting.

In any case, we're now ready for the next step, which is to make a fully fledged  study in charcoal, on A2 format.  This begins with the usual line block in, which is the stage I'm currently at in this drawing, and that you can see here:

You may think: "all that work just for this??"   Well, yes.  It doesn't look impressive, but remember all I've learned about this piece before getting to this stage:

- I know how I want to frame the image
- I'm making use of strong compositional principles
- I've created the face drawing in 5 minutes with my paper intact
- I'm clear about the value structure I want to use

In a way, at this stage I have my work cut out for me, which allows me to spend all my mental energy thinking of the technique I will use for laying down the tone, in view of the end result I want.

Hope this helps anyone who's curious about how to start a portrait drawing or painting and wants a result that is better than average.  I will continue to work on this piece and post the progress as I go along.  The plan is to finish the charcoal study and then perhaps create a color study in pastel, before finally creating an oil master.

Drawing Lessons Amsterdam, The Use of Skin Tones

During my drawing lessons in Amsterdam, students who want to start painting are usually attracted to either making still life works or portraits.

Portraits pose a challenge that has kept artists of all strides interested in that aspect of the arts for as long as we can trace history.  The first challenge is posed by the drawing itself, but even if you achieve this with dexterity, if you're aim is to make a portrait in color, flesh tones are the next challenge.

In this post I try to provide a few pointers in dealing with flesh tones, which should help you get around this very typical problem.  As with all my posts, I recommend you keep these as suggestions, and that you try to practice as much as possible from life, which is in the end, the only thing that will make your art get to the next level.

So here are my tips:

Tip No 1: Brown, pink and yellow are not to be abused

A common mistake is to simplify skin tones into their cartoonish versions and go for the flat single color look that people are 'supposed' to be.  This is a widespread mistake with all painting where our mental concepts of an object take precedence over our visual input, but nowhere does it become more painfully obvious than in a portrait.  In a way, learning to paint is learning to un-learn what we think and give precedence to what we actually see. 

What you see in real life is that the color of skin, like the color of everything else is determined by 3 aspects:

- Local color, in this case the brown, pink and yellow
- Direct light
- Reflected light or reflected colors

Using pre-mixed 'skin' colors and lack of observational knowledge usually results in the abuse of the use of local color at the expense of the other two.  The result is a portrait that appears as if airbrushed with fake tan:

Tip No 2: When possible work from life

As I explain on a separate post, working from life is superior to working from picture references for several reasons, not least of which is your ability to perceive colors, which is at least at the moment, superior to that of a camera capturing them, and a monitor relaying them to you.

Technology adds steps and limitations that get in the way and fall short of the way a human would perceive a scene.  Colors are lost, tones and values compressed and the result in general less than ideal.

If you must work from photos, make sure that you practice working from life so that you know what to look for and how to correct for the downsides of photography.  Many artists offering portraits on commission work from photo and do it very well, but the good ones work mostly from life


Tip No 3: Beware of your chroma (saturation)

Skin is a subtle thing and painting it right can be a challenge.  However, if your aim is to paint realist portraits and nudes it's probably better to err toward the side of a low color saturation, instead of a high one. 

During my Amsterdam painting classes, I invite my students to look at the work of the old masters, and what you inevitably notice is subtle tones of off-gray color, as opposed to strong pinks, browns or yellows.  I once heard of an artist that like to create a 'symphony of grays', and that should be a good thing to keep in mind. 

This is not to say you can use strong color, but know when and where to be vibrant and your painting will sing.  Do it all the time and it will just scream mindlessly.   The real painting master learns to navigate an ever narrower band of color and value.  This takes knowledge of color mixing, discipline and dexterity in applying it.  Even if you don't achieve the level of a Rembrandt, it is working towards it that counts.

A good principle when learning to draw and paint is to do things in a way that your lacks and mistakes are exposed, not hidden.  That's what brings about learning and improvement!



Tip No 4: Decide the finish you're chasing after

When you make a portrait, it is good to start with a strong idea of the type of outcome you are looking for.  You don't need to have every bit totally planned out, but if we talk about skin you should be clear on the type of finish and brushwork you'll be using.

This is particularly important for skin colors on a portrait painting, because skin in real life has a translucent quality. 

You should decide whether you'll try to replicate this with a layered (glazed) painting or go for thicker layers and focus on the texture qualities of the medium.  Decisions, decisions, decisions. No painting can accommodate all your ideas, and the best ones are the ones with a clear purpose.

Deciding this will improve the way you apply your skin tones and in turn the end result.

Portrait commissions in Amsterdam, Tips for Working from Photos

As you can tell by the title of this latest post, I decided to feed lord Google a bit more content about my portrait commissions in Amsterdam.

There, now that I've used the keyword, I will tell you about a nice little portrait I made while playing around with some pastels. In doing so I will touch upon some of the topics that I discuss during my Amsterdam painting lessons, regarding color temperature, working from life versus working from pictures and impressionistic color.  Mostly, however,  I will try to discuss my process when working from photo, and things I do to try and obtain a better overall result.

I will use some high res images to illustrate this point and hope that this helps you relate to my color examples.

Here is an original photo that I took from my nephew Luke Patrick while he was toying around with his food during breakfast:

So lets discuss some of the things I try to do when making a photo for a later portrait commission or my own projects. 

Here are some tips:

Tip # 1: I know this is a tall order, but learn about portraiture

Obvious poses, people smiling while looking at the camera and that sort of thing makes for a tacky result.  An artistic portrait captures who the person is, while if you take a snapshot of the person smiling, it looks somehow timebound. Muscles in the face don't maintain an authentic smile for too long so a big smiling portrait looks unnatural and too photo-like. 

If you look at the work of all the great portrait artists in Amsterdam including the old masters, rarely will you see a big smile.  Those were saved for party scenes in the sort of raise-your-cups moment, or tavern scenes.

The best photos for portrait or otherwise will capture the person totally caught in some activity, their mind is perhaps in the moment, or elsewhere, but certainly not thinking of the camera.


Remember, this photo will be the basis for the portrait commission and the artist cannot compensate for a poor pose.

In the case of this particular photo, I set my camera to silent mode, made sure the flash was not active, and the proceeded to make pictures of the unsuspecting Luke throughout breakfast.  In the end I had many many shots to choose from and select for the best light, posture, expression, etc.


Tip # 2: Use the best camera, borrow if necessary

This point is extremely important.  Don't expect to make a picture with your mobile phone and then have a great reference for your portrait. 

Cameras do nasty things to images as it is.  The values tend to be compressed, colors that you see in nature disappear and unless your model is totally still and you're using bracketing, anything other than a nice overcast day will result in darks that are totally black and highlights that are totally white, making the useful tonal range far smaller than what your eye would give you in real life.

Personally, I invested in a Leica, the best of the best.  Leica has a long German tradition of making the best optics in the world, and a big part of what they give you is the ability to avoid chromatic aberration, or plainly stated, they don't distort color.  Therefore the photos I get from it are the closest I've seen to working from life.

Now unless you're a portrait artist the investment may not be justified, but there are some compact versions that you may want to consider.  Other good cameras such as new Canons and Nikons may give you good results as well.



Tip # 3: Select your light conditions wisely
Drawing and painting really boils down to portraying light.  When making a portrait what you're really doing is portraying how light wraps around someone's face.

Keeping in mind that cameras have limitations, try to work with what your camera can do.  A portrait in a dark room may be a great moody and mysterious project to make, but your camera may not allow for a great result.

Full sunlight on someone's face is not always esthetically nice, plus is likely to make them squint.  Interior lights that are too yellow could end up making the face look jaundiced or fake-tanned once the picture is translated to a painting. 

Try to find a pleasant light.  Masters use to work with overcast northern light.  This makes for clean crisp colors and no dramatic shadows.   This looks nice, though you must be good in handing your values.

Others use a direct white light, which makes the light-dark effect more dramatic on the portrait and helps give the face lots of structure.



Tip # 4: Use Photoshop to its full advantage
When you want to make a portrait from photo, a big mistake is to think that great photographers just point and shoot. 

Typically what is happening is professionals spending a large amount of time setting up the light and environment, the model, making a very large number of shots, and finally post-processing or editing.

This editing used to be about how films were revealed in a dark room. Now it's all about photoshop. 

Get used to fiddling around with Photoshop until you have what you want. Take care not to go too crazy with tacky digital effects.  At least in my case, I'm trying to get as close as I can to what I saw during the photo shoot and help the portrait result. 

The portrait of Luke was enhanced a bit in therms of its chroma (saturation) as you can see by comparing a normal picture, versus my enhanced sample:

 

I did this based on what I found pleasing to my eyes, but also taking into consideration that I would make a portrait with pastels, which allow for a very intense use of color if one is so inclined.

Tip # 5: Work from life

Nothing replaces the experience that comes from making a portrait from the live model.  My Amsterdam portrait commissions sometimes allow for this and whenever I can, I take full advantage of this.

The live model offers you depth of form, richness of color and a connection to the subject that will show through in the result.  Yes it is more challenging and hard to arrange.  The model has to sit around for quite some time and it's far from the exciting artistic fun that some people have in mind.  But it really is worth it, whether you're a portrait artist or thinking of a portrait commission.

The work of a portrait artist that only works from photos shows something of a superficial understanding of the technique.  It is usually someone who's just copying one to one what he or she sees in the picture.  This results in an unnatural 'airbrushed' feel in black and white:

And a sort of fake tan combined with flour spots when working in color:

As I've said in previous posts, these are clear examples of bad handling of values and color temperature that come from thinking that in copying a photo you can make a good portrait.

See here two examples of the opposite result, when the artist (in this case yours trully) knows what they're doing:

So this covers some of the process that I use for my portrait commissions in Amsterdam.  I will be following up with a post about handing flesh tones which is usually a challenging subject for beginning artists.