I am currently reading Virgil Elliot on painting. There’s a good chapter on portraits. I’m taking notes because what’s written is almost the most important thing for me in the book. It’s not hard for me to share them on Facebook, maybe it will be useful to someone. Photographers might find something useful too.
(…) One should completely avoid using photographs as references for drawing. A photographic image differs in many ways from the image in the human brain created from light hitting the eyes, then processed by the brain. It is the latter image that interests the artist.
An image of a head in sharp focus, with every wrinkle and hair in high resolution, looks implausible despite its neatness and precision. Among painters, this is considered a sign of a novice. It’s easy to fall into the trap of recording too much detail because when we draw something, we look at it and focus on it, and see it in sharp focus. But this does not correspond to visual reality, because we cannot see the entire scene in sharp focus in reality. The camera, having no brain, does not understand this principle and records details uniformly across its focal plane. A drawn portrait should convey the impression received by the brain when personally looking at a live subject, not the impression that arises when looking at a photograph.
The camera, having no brain, does not understand this principle, and records details uniformly across its focal plane. A drawn portrait should convey the impression received by the brain when personally looking at a live subject, not the impression that arises when looking at a photograph. These are two different impressions. Hence, the question is how to retain the likeness while at the same time omitting or suppressing the details of the subject’s features that we can only see in sharp focus when we look closely at them. The answer is that the likeness is often lost as soon as we add too many details.
Eti…
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 