Why bother to do a drawing when you can take a photo? Why bother to take a photo if you prefer to do drawings? How can you turn a photo into a drawing?
Why Take A Photo
Often you see a place which is pretty but don't have time to draw or don't have sketching stuff with you. You can take a photo and draw later, in the evening, in daylight, or when you get home from a holiday or day trip.
Moving objects such as animals are best captured in photos. You can tell a bird in a tree to sit and wait while I draw you.
Why Draw Rather Than Photo?
You might want a drawing instead or in addition to add a personal touch, to add to a birthday card, to a collection of drawings on a wall, because you can sell a drawing for more than a mere photo.Just because you enjoy drawing.
Just as you can crop a photo, you can make a drawing from a small part of a cropped photo. Or you can add items, for example a point of interest, a human, a dog, a transplanted tree, in a landscape with an empty centre or lacking human interest. You can juggle elements of one photo, do a montage of different places in a city or resort, add missing members of a family to a group portrait, or combine two photos (even a bride and groom where the best photos of each are in different photos.
Why take your own photo? I like to take a photo of myself with a celebrity, not just be sent a stock photo. It proves I have met the person. A picture adds credibility to my text. It brings back memories of the event. I can sell a photo which I have taken, not somebody else's photo. An editor won't want a stock photo used before by other people.
Even a drawing from somebody else's photo can involve you in copyright photos. One way round this is to take elements from Wikipedia, those photos which allow you to adapt them in any way, and not in copyright or requiring any acknowledgement because they are in public domain, for example taken many years ago so copyright has expired.
Once you have found or created a photo, you create a grid and copy small sections at a time. This makes it easy to retain the proportions. You don't end up with a Picasso type drawing with floating eyes.
Doing small sections also gets you over the fear of starting a major project, and being overwhelmed by the enormity of it, or not knowing where to start. Some people like to start a portrait with the eyes. Or start in the middle. A scientific minded person might start top right and move along horizontally, line by line.
You break the whole task into tiny sections and just complete one at a time. Having started one small section you are then inclined to finish the lot. But, if you prefer, you can come back to it.
An excellent video on this subject is provided free as a taster end tempter and try out for a downloadable drawing course.
If you still have the scene or person you have photographed, and then drawn from the photograph, you can finish your set of pictures by photographing the drawing with the photograph or the sitter with the drawing.
http://thesecretstodrawing.com/about-the-secrets-to-drawing/
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, caricaturist.
Why Take A Photo
Often you see a place which is pretty but don't have time to draw or don't have sketching stuff with you. You can take a photo and draw later, in the evening, in daylight, or when you get home from a holiday or day trip.
Moving objects such as animals are best captured in photos. You can tell a bird in a tree to sit and wait while I draw you.
Why Draw Rather Than Photo?
You might want a drawing instead or in addition to add a personal touch, to add to a birthday card, to a collection of drawings on a wall, because you can sell a drawing for more than a mere photo.Just because you enjoy drawing.
Just as you can crop a photo, you can make a drawing from a small part of a cropped photo. Or you can add items, for example a point of interest, a human, a dog, a transplanted tree, in a landscape with an empty centre or lacking human interest. You can juggle elements of one photo, do a montage of different places in a city or resort, add missing members of a family to a group portrait, or combine two photos (even a bride and groom where the best photos of each are in different photos.
Why take your own photo? I like to take a photo of myself with a celebrity, not just be sent a stock photo. It proves I have met the person. A picture adds credibility to my text. It brings back memories of the event. I can sell a photo which I have taken, not somebody else's photo. An editor won't want a stock photo used before by other people.
Even a drawing from somebody else's photo can involve you in copyright photos. One way round this is to take elements from Wikipedia, those photos which allow you to adapt them in any way, and not in copyright or requiring any acknowledgement because they are in public domain, for example taken many years ago so copyright has expired.
Once you have found or created a photo, you create a grid and copy small sections at a time. This makes it easy to retain the proportions. You don't end up with a Picasso type drawing with floating eyes.
Doing small sections also gets you over the fear of starting a major project, and being overwhelmed by the enormity of it, or not knowing where to start. Some people like to start a portrait with the eyes. Or start in the middle. A scientific minded person might start top right and move along horizontally, line by line.
You break the whole task into tiny sections and just complete one at a time. Having started one small section you are then inclined to finish the lot. But, if you prefer, you can come back to it.
An excellent video on this subject is provided free as a taster end tempter and try out for a downloadable drawing course.
If you still have the scene or person you have photographed, and then drawn from the photograph, you can finish your set of pictures by photographing the drawing with the photograph or the sitter with the drawing.
http://thesecretstodrawing.com/about-the-secrets-to-drawing/
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, caricaturist.
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