James Murch, Portrait Drawing 2008

Portraits from Photographs

The Big Stock Photo and Portrait Drawing - March 2008

We know from James’s question (See Ask Mike! at the end of the critique) that he has struggled like many artists, with having to learn without the benefit of live models or having good quality reference photos to work from. So obviously in desperation for source material he resorted to purchasing stock photos. (Of course now we have given you all a few ideas so there are no more excuses.)

The trouble with working from fashion ‘stock’ photos is that the lighting is too flat for our needs as portrait artists. What we are looking for are interesting plays of light and dark to help us describe 3-dimensional form. A Stock photo is a photo taken by a professional fashion photographer for commercial purposes and flaws are airbrushed out, light is flattened and comes from multiple sources.

It's always better to work from your own photos when possible when you can't work from life.

Despite the photo source, James has made an admiral attempt back in March '08. As novices often do, he has ended up with a caricature of the model that while not yet a realist portrait, is not without its charms.

James you’ve done a good job structuring and placing the features and your arabesque has good straight lines. The main struggle is with your primary height to width ratio and the initial arabesque angles, especially with regard to the angle of the model’s back and the right side of the hair style has meant your plumb-lines henceforth were thrown off forcing you to squeeze the features into too narrow a space. I suspect when you did your first arabesque that you squared off but drew the lines describing each curl around the outer shape of the head. With complex hairdos like this it would have helped you to simplify the hair even further at this stage and establish the all important height to width ratios by only drawing the major angles from highest to widest points. The term for this is drawing the "envelope".

You mentioned before having trouble with your computer screen distorting images so perhaps that was the reason if you were drawing from the screen instead of printing the image. In any case the width of the face is not wide enough as you can see. The other main problem is the iris’s being too large. The whites of the eyes generally fall into shadow but there is clearly a lot more of them showing than in the portrait. Be careful with highlights in the eyes, they are best understated. And you did well understating the false eyelashes. Eyelashes need to be handled tonally. The odd wisp can be added but don’t delineate every lash.

The teeth need to be knocked down with tone as they fall into shadow and the lower lip is a bit too narrow giving the appearance of buck teeth. As you can see the shoulders are too small for the figure. If you are going to include shoulders and back, observe the angles and include them in your initial arabesque then check the negative shapes around the figure and your plumb lines. All in all your drawing is a good initial attempt and learning experience.