Drawing from Reference

For the latest project I’m working on, my client is asking for more realism than I usually deal with (which seems to be a trend of late). While I’d much rather push the grotesque, cutesy or stylised angles than the purely representative, I’m taking the challenge in my stride and forging ahead.

Whenever I’m having trouble getting a drawing right, I always remember an important tip I read in one of my all-time favourite books about drawing, Roland Harvey’s Drawing Book:

When in doubt, observe, observe, observe.

Nothing beats drawing from a reference, at least when it comes to representative drawing. And the more tangible the reference, the better. Drawing from a photo is good. From the actual live subject, better. Fine artists like Stan Prokopenko stress the importance of “being there”:

You might get tired and hungry, but you have to push through and finish that painting. “I’ll take a picture and finish it at home” usually doesn’t work.

In “The Art of Seeing”, writer Aldous Huxley also gives credence to drawing from life, but in a much broader sense of developing one’s appreciation of nature, citing vision as our strongest and most personally affecting sense (although this may be a wistful bias of Huxley, who had severely scratched corneas since the age of 16, and hence, horrible vision.)

With all this in mind, I hired the cheapest model I know: me. I probably would have been able to use myself as a “live” reference with the aid of a mirror, but I opted for an impromptu photo shoot instead:

Part of the brief for this project was a character that looked “obsessed”. I guess I really took that note on board, as evident in the amount of reference photos I took before I was happy.

Here’s the rough that came out of the observation:

I wish I’d saved the rough I did prior to using a reference, so you could see how much having a reference improves the drawing.

Here’s another round of reference photos, and the subsequent rough:

When you get a little confidence in your drawing ability, it can be easy to think that you don’t need a reference. Using one may even feel a little like cheating. But don’t underestimate the power of observation. Drawing from life forces you to really examine something, be it a landscape, still life or human figure.

Pay attention to what your eyes are telling you.