i don´t know if you know, but you always can ask for more space to the mods ...and if they think you´ll need it...you got it :)

You've been working really hard at this... it's obvious and it's paying off. I like the style of this, the proportions are good and the colors you chose work really well, even the way you incorporated them into the light in the background.

This was certainly worth the effort.

Wow! You really nailed that ref! Check it out man! Shop and compare! :)

One of my favorite pictures of yours so far! Great job! I knew you would do a fabulous job!

Thanks guys. :)

Nailing the reference wasn't really a major act of skill so much as a cheat. I ended up imposing a grid for the initial line drawing on both the photo and in Lascaux when doing the line drawing. That made it easy to make the outlines very quickly and get all the major features almost dead on (the slight deviations are only because I couldn't copy the grid cells exactly when making the outlines, especially in the hand on the left which I had a hard time picking out). I don't do this for all straight-from-photo pictures, but often if something is really off and I can't tell what it is, another thing I'll do is take a screenshot, bring it into photoshop, overlay my work over the original image, and see where I'm off that way by comparing the two right over another. Oh well, now I'm giving away my secrets, but I don't want people to think I have some superpowers when it comes to nailing the references: it's just a mechanical process.

Yeah I figured it was a grid thing. I've used em too, handy little fuckers.
So you put a grid on the ref without resizing it, and then tried to match the proportions of the grid on the ref to the grid you drew on your canvas?

Fantastic form Comd.

It'd be really funny if some random new member accused comd of copyiing and pasting a picture in Lascaux now. Haven't had one of those in a while.

This woman looks like she could whup my ass. The body, swimsuit and hair are all great, but the face is bugging me for some reason. It's not the proportions... maybe it seems a little cartoony or something. I can't quite put my finger on it.

dude. he totally copied this. and pasted it. yea. like that.

Axil62: generally want the picture size to match up with the canvas size or at least be a multiple of it. In this case, the original photo was quite a bit smaller than the canvas so I made it larger (also at that size, even 1 pixel grid lines looked too thick on it and were obscuring all the important details).

Zack: looking at the comparison Axil made, I can see that I sort of flattened out the area underneath the eye on the left. I didn't get the shading quite right there. Also I made the nose a bit more narrow than the original picture, her chin looks kind of bumpy because I made that sharp highlight, the edges between the lit portions of her face on the left and the dark portions on the right have too hard of an edge, and her lips are pretty off. :( Also all the subtle nuances of reflected light on the right side of the face I ignored and simplified to a large region of shadow. Also the shadow region looks like it has more contrast which makes the face look sort of harder than the original. I think those are the main parts that look messed up (at least to me). Also with the cartoony look, I tried turning the lines off and painting for a while, but I deviated quite a bit from the photo at that point so as a final touch, I just reenabled the line drawing, but since my shading and outlines didn't quite match up, it sort of looks like the line drawing is floating in areas.

Doh - I'm starting to really hate this picture. I will delete it in a short while - it was too mechanically done, and it goes against my goals of drawing more loosely and without becoming a slave to the reference (or not using references at all). I just ended up sinking back to my comfort zone for this one.

Marcello: Yup, remember when I used to hack this site and paste a ref onto the canvas and then just paint over it? Yea, boy oh boy, those were the days huh? Good times...good times..

I can't tell if you guys are being serious, but being as I've contributed to the Lascaux source code, I imagine people would be quite suspicious that I might be a hacker. Anyway, the mechanical process of using a grid was against my better judgement and inconsistent with my personal goals of improving, so I'm going to delete this in 10 and will get back to drawing without references.

Dude, calm down. Don't delete this. There isn't a damn thing wrong with using a grid. People use them in traditional medium all the time. I know I have. It's a good draw. I wasn't accusing you of hacking, I was referring to a time when someone accused me of it. Yer cool, keep on goin.

Just fantastic. The lighting looks great! :D

Oh thanks, I was getting worried. I learned the grid method mainly as a poor man's way to transfer a drawing onto a canvas for painting traditionally (as opposed to using really expensive carbon paper). I still don't feel right using it like this. Again it's against my personal goal. I got too into wanting to make a pretty picture again rather than improving. Both this one and the wizard I submitted used a grid, as well as my first photo-based drawing in the beginner's section. Looking at all of them, I can tell they're all kind of stiff in some kind of way as opposed to my looser ones, which probably aren't as good technically (though they carry more energy). The wizard perhaps the least, but I used the grid mainly just to get the positioning of the features right, at which point I started to improvise quite a bit from there (I find it much easier to improvise with men's faces, as women, especially attractive ones, seem to need their features to be pretty accurate to keep their original attractiveness).

Anyway, I'm going to quit that starting right now, and I'm going to make a habit to post my references more whenever I draw from them (though my goal is to ultimately not draw from references) so you guys can catch me on it and scold as necessary. :) These still work as nice coloring/shading exercises, but they hardly give me anything useful from a drawing standpoint since I'm just copying 2D shapes when I do that rather than properly seeing and feeling the 3D form, which is really what I need to be doing to reach my goal of being able to improvise and create characters from imagination. I was just having a bad week and was in the mood to just paint and not challenge myself by really taking a risk and drawing everything freehand without the mechanical aid of a grid or photoshop overlay comparisons, but really I was just copping out again. Surprisingly the one picture I have in the showcase is the one from which I used the reference most loosely of all (I hardly even looked at it except when I ran into problems), and it's sort of obvious by the way her face kept deforming with each revision. Perhaps the person who put it there was able to sense that I was hardly copying the photo in that one, but that picture is actually one of my least favorites. :|

oooh...grids! good idea *makes mental note*

I wish I had the patience to learn to do that, but then again, I'm really quite glad that I don't, because then I'd feel compelled to check everything against the reference in that manner, and I don't want to put myself through that. (I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with using something like that as a study tool - I remember in one of my earlier art classes we had to find the tiniest reference photo, draw a graph/grid on it, and then enlarge the grid to giant paper and reproduce it.)

I already think I lost something painting digitally, somehow, somewhere, and I keep dragging out my canvases and my brushes and thinking I should buy new paint and get some in my hair. (although I don't really see myself giving this up completely or not trying to slowly learn things that might make me better at it)

oh, and as far as painting from references goes, there's no need to make excuses for it. Claude Monet sat in a f!@#$% hay field from daylight till dusk looking at the haystacks to paint them, and Van Gogh went out into the uncomfortable fields to paint the workers because... well, because just glimpsing them and then painting from memory is difficult. Current successful artists hold entire huge HOORAHS where people dress up and reinact events where the artists take photographs to paint from. Chill about it, people, it's not a sin.

Who said it was?

lots of critics give artists hell for it, not just here... I was just reading an article in an old issue of American Artist regarding the subject... if I can find it I'll post it somewhere here... it was a sort of "debate" regarding the issue

Wonderful piece. Truly.

I must rant on grids. Please call this the "Drawing without Guilt" rant. :)

We all grid. You cannot do a realistic drawing without using proportion. To gauge the correct proportion you must grid, by eye or with lines, but you need to drop a "plumb line" and you need to see the "level line" or things won't line up. The longer and more often one draws the better their eye gets BUT every artist will need a "tool" at one time or another. I have a great "eye" (better than my drawing skills cuz i don't take time for my work) and critque drawings every day and have for the past 15 yrs as i teach realistic drawing to adults. Many times I have to use a pencil to sight or to measure proportions. Drawing is gridding.

In the Renaissance, all those folks we revere..well..let me tell you, they used devices all over the place. They used stand up 3d grids and set them in front of the subject to help them see. You can still buy those grids today. They used "sighting sticks", a stick stuck in a bucket to mark the dead center of the subject so they could judge better. And don't even get me started on the "camera obscura" which is now being thought to have had VERY widespread use...it allowed the Renaisance artist to actually TRACE the outline of the subject matter, much like todays projectors.

In my humble opinion, tracing is "cheating". Anything else, including the use of an overlaid grid is still drawing. You still have plenty of visual decisions to make. So I say, don't worry about it at all.

About drawing without a ref. Pshaw. Really. I know a very famous artist for MAD magazine. He has been drawing every single day, all day, for over 40 yrs and he STILL will go and find a ref to see how stuff looks if he has never studied that object before or drawn a figure from a particular angle. The whole point of drawing being hard is because things are so visually COMPLICATED. There is just too much visual information contained in the most simple of things to be able to draw a hyper realistic pic of it with no ref. You can draw a nice draw that "feels" real, but look closely enuff and it won't be, not really. (I am only discussing realism here.)

My 2 fav artist quotes are:

"My work has offended both God and man". That was Leonardo near the end of his life.

"If people knew how long and how hard I have worked to achieve my mastery, they would not be nearly so impressed". That was Michelangelo. :)

Sorry for the rant, i only have 2, this one and the modern art one. I won't rant again, promise. I'll be good!

Thanks guys. I kind of said it was a cheat myself, though I meant it only in the sense that I was somewhat cheating myself (based on my ultimate goal of drawing loosely and imaginatively) by using a grid at the outline stage. I want to draw figures without necessarily achieving accuracy, so I want to ultimately master construction of figures and heads (basically learn to draw some average head/figure and then be able to adjust the figure based on the subject). That obviously won't yield as much accuracy as using mechanical means like a grid, but it helps me a lot more in terms of what I'm doing and it opens things up more to artistic interpretation.

If I'm using a photo, I still want to construct figures in 3D (using spheres and cylinders and so forth) rather than thinking in 2D shapes and patterns which is pretty much what I did here. In other words, I want to draw from photos the same way I draw from imagination/memory, and if I'm drawing from a photo, I want to do so in order to become better at drawing from imagination, as that's my ultimate goal. That said, I don't want to force myself to not use references when they can be beneficial, but I don't want the lack of references to prevent me from being able to draw something either.

There are several ways I know to accurately copy a photo. One is to cut the photo in half, tape one half to your paper, and then draw the other half by looking at the other half of the photo as you draw. Having one half next to the other half you are drawing gives you a half-established face, for instance, from which you can judge all the marks for the other half of the face. That doesn't really work in oekaki applets. The other is the grid method which is the most laborious and tedious to use. I hate using it, but this past week, I wasn't really in the mood for challenging myself at the drawing stage. Also a looser variation on the grid is to just draw some lines on the photo (diagonals, triangles, etc) and then try to copy those shapes on to the canvas, and then you have some marks to relate all other marks. This is more pleasant than a full-blown grid, and the lines and shapes can often be more meaningful and efficient than straight grid lines. Then for digital there's photoshop overlaying in which you can overlay your picture over the original as Axil did to compare mine, and you can see which marks are off and adjust things correctly. I have to admit I've done that last one (photoshop overlays) in between revisions for almost all of my reference-based pics, though the grid method is something I use sparingly (for this case, I just wasn't in the mood to challenge myself at the drawing stage, and I wanted to play around more at the painting stage with how I blend tones and how I establish colors). Ultimately I want to be able to paint without even using line drawings or underpaintings: I want to paint the subject straight in full color with thick opaque brush strokes, and I definitely don't want to use any of these techniques when doing that. My goals are based around speed, looseness, and improvisation and these techniques don't help at all there.

Without using any of these techniques, I have a very hard time reaching a good resemblance to the photo, though if I know the subject, I can get some resemblance to the subject even though I'm very off from the photo. An example of an exceptionally bad one is my latest doodle: http://cellosoft.com/2draw/view/65922/. In this one, I wasn't even trying to get any sort of photo resemblance (I was actually trying to do a caricature, but I suck at those - especially when I only know the subject through one photo, as in this case), and I was particularly sloppy about it. I posted the reference pic in an edit so it can be compared, but it's pretty obviously off. The way I copied that one was I basically grasped the stylus, looked at the photo, and drew without taking my eyes off the photo (not even looking at what I was drawing). That allowed me to establish the main marks quickly (which weren't 100% correct, but close enough to use as a measure for the rest of the strokes), at which point I then started using some of the basic things I knew about the proportions of an average head (eyes being in the middle of the head vertically and so forth) to make sure I wasn't too off. Note that the 37 minute timer on that one is pretty off: I spent at least half that time trying some other doodles over my original one which I hated. Anyway, that's about the extent of my copying skills when I completely freehand without doing any photoshop overlays or grids, though I can maybe do slightly better using that technique when I'm not sloppy about it (in that case, I was just wanting to paint over my original drawing which I hated, and I just wanted to put something down quickly and didn't really care as much about quality as long as it wasn't something I hated). Still, I'm not very good at copying photos freehanded, though I did the same thing starting out with Stinky, but he was a subject I knew by heart, so I already had most of his features memorized to get a good likeness even without getting close to the photo, and I still did the overlay comparisons for him to verify and adjust certain features after I made the initial marks.

You might find it an interesting exercise to take a ref and try drawing it at a different angle. As soon as I have more free time I intend to make a number of drawings that are loosely referenced like that; maybe they have the same angle but different lighting, or they have different shading styles, etc. Personally, I see loose references as training wheels and strict references as crutches, but that's in terms of my own artistic goals and not a criticism of other artists here. In light of your goals, I'd say dropping the grid system is probably a good idea.

Modifying angles, lighting, or the original 3D form of the reference is the kind of stuff I'd like to ultimately do when using references. Just anything that demands the 3D form is understood so that it could be used to produce other 3D forms is what would benefit me most. I tend to be more 2D-oriented when copying photos regardless of whether I'm using measuring devices or just freehanding, and that's useful for copying 2D images, but not for inventing 3D ones. I tend to ask questions like, "what's the 2D shape of this highlight? How does it relate vertically and horizontally to this other mark?" Rather than, "what's the 3D form of this figure"? If I understood the 3D form, then I could invent my own highlights without using the precise shapes in the photograph.

I pretty much knew this picture wasn't what I should have been doing when I started on it based on my goals, regardless of the grid (though the grid made it that much worse). I set out only to draw the reference as accurately as possible and nothing more. In that sense, it's one of my biggest failures since that's the last thing I want to be doing in the future as I progress. I didn't even try to experiment with painterly techniques - I was trying to be as unpainterly as possible in this one so that it would look just like a photo. Generally I get the most comments about the painterly aspects of my works when working from photos, but this time I really wanted to try not being painterly (I tend to be painterly for economical purposes, not intentionally). I didn't even really achieve the photorealism I intended to achieve despite the use of the grid for the line drawing, so I didn't even succeed in that respect. While it's completely against my personal goals, I still admire the artists on here who can make their paintings look just like a photograph. I was hoping to achieve it here, but I think I deviated too much in the shading and still relied too much on lines which gave that sort of cartoony effect in places.

omg biggest posts ever. great pic and i've been a victim of the grid in the past. when the masters of the past were working on frescoes - they couldn't draw straight from life, so they did their preliminary drawing and they would grid that whole wall up before doing some of the greatest paintings ever made, theres no shame :):)

Mmm... (damn you essay writters.)