I just spent the past hour trying to draw a realistic self-portrait for an online drawing class. It looks nothing like me. I don't think I'll be showing that to you anytime soon
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Just noticed the instructor's been posting already. Here's what he had to say on the subject:
The reason I’ve asked you to draw it from life…all right, a mirror is not real life, but for our purposes it’s close enough…is because other images--especially photographs--have already processed a lot of the visual information for you. That means that the camera has chosen which shadows to glue together, decided how to distort your face according to the lens, frozen your image in time. Because of that, your drawings might look like you know something when in fact you don’t. Which means that I won’t know to teach it to you, and you’ll miss out on something that could save your bacon later.
So…if at all possible, please, grab a mirror. If you want to draw yourself from the side, grab two mirrors. If the notion of staring at yourself in the mirror still freaks you out, you’re probably undead, in which case, you’re screwed, because I don’t think you show up in photos, either.
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Different process, different challenge.
(it would be closer in motion, but we lose a lot of resolution, and of course the whole third dimension)
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The reason I’ve asked you to draw it from life…all right, a mirror is not real life, but for our purposes it’s close enough…is because other images--especially photographs--have already processed a lot of the visual information for you. That means that the camera has chosen which shadows to glue together, decided how to distort your face according to the lens, frozen your image in time. Because of that, your drawings might look like you know something when in fact you don’t. Which means that I won’t know to teach it to you, and you’ll miss out on something that could save your bacon later.
So…if at all possible, please, grab a mirror. If you want to draw yourself from the side, grab two mirrors. If the notion of staring at yourself in the mirror still freaks you out, you’re probably undead, in which case, you’re screwed, because I don’t think you show up in photos, either.
Good luck!
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That's still not the point of a drawing class. If it were, I wouldn't need take one.
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