drawing from photos

People ask if I work from photos or from real life. The answer is both, but with a heavy emphasis on photos.

I use a camera to gather my information, and I use sketches to arrange and improve a scene. Real life is messy, and I try to clean it up! There are principles of composition that make 2 dimensional art more pleasing without seriously altering reality.

Here is a photo and a drawing of the same scene. You may notice there is more stuff in the drawing than the photo – this is because I work from multiple photos to create the scene that I experienced, rather than copy the photo by rote. True confessions: I used to copy everything exactly as it appeared in the photo because I was greener than grass, didn’t know any better and thought it would be “cheating” otherwise! Live and learn . . . this is called GROWTH!