IN LIEU OF A NEW STRIP :: Please Accept This Young Chinese Gentleman
[ABOVE: From May 08 National Geographic; a series of portraits of Chinese citizens. I can't find a credit for the photographer anywhere, which is very odd for the Nat'l Geo.]
I have a love-hate relationship with drawing from photos.
On the one hand, I find it enormously educational. I've been copying the odd photo from National Geographics over the last year or so, usually pictures with striking compositions, or a face with an interesting structure, etc. I have no formal education, so these kind of auto-didactic exercises are where I get most of my learning in. Not to mention functional practice at sketching, inking, and just the physical muscle memory it takes to draw sometimes. Plus, the process of translating something into a drawing, choosing what to leave in, what to leave out (as Bob Seger would say), is educational in and of itself.
The problem with drawing from photos is that you're drawing from a photo. The camera has already translated the image once, from three dimensions down to two. It has already left things in and out. So you have to pick from what's left and try to trick a viewer into thinking whatever it is you want them to think. Some people can do it--some people make effective and affecting art with a lot of photo-reference, but to me it always seems that that art works in spite of its reliance on photos, rather than because of it.
Of course there are varying degrees of reference, et cetera, to be considered. But there's no getting around that cold frozen look that drawings from photos invariably have. One of my favorite critics, Frank Santoro, has talked from time to time about this on the Comics Comics blog, but I can't find that post now and am late for work already.
And besides, the only reason I'm posting this handsome, affluent Chinese gentleman is to stand-in for the new DHARBIN! strip, which is completed except for the greytones I decided at the last minute to add. I'll wrap those up after work and have the strip up forthwith. In the meantime, I hope that you have a lovely day.