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Good Natured Challenge

It was a facebook exchange. Jacqueline likes to draw and had decided to sketch from a girlhood photo she’d found.

I recommended that she go easy on the nose, pay attention to the hair and the way it terminates, manage the lighting, etc. etc. etc..

Then she suggested that I try to make those ideas work with my own sketch. It was a good natured challenge and I took it up for fun.

This is a situation where knowing something of the subject and her history made it easier to decide how to manage the depiction, especially considering the very limited detail available in the little photo.

To me, it made the most sense to feminize the drawing. She is a girl after all. In childhood she was a bit of a tom boy and took a ribbing for it. So I decided to go the other way and create an unambiguously girlish persona in the drawing. Because I’m busy on other projects, I kept it simple and small.

Drawing from photographic data is very useful in terms of saving time and can’t be replaced at all in some situations. It’s a good exercise for beginning sketchers. That said, it can throw serious kinks into art because to simply reproduce what you see in the photo is in my opinion creative suicide. Nearly always the lighting and other parts of the image have to be modified. In this case, I opted for bland light so as to kill  what looks like a flash. The dress and body were scavanged off the net, since the original photo stops at shoulders. That allowed me to dress her girly and sit her in a sweet posture that I then enhanced by bringing her hair more to the front,  light and very fine with curls.

The original photo

The original photo

The point of all this was just to have fun, but it does illustrate that an old photo can be used to good advantage if needed.

I took liberties with the light, her posture and attire, and her hair to get away from the tomboy imagery

I took liberties with the light, her posture and attire, and her hair to get away from the tomboy imagery

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