Before and After Photos

I work from photographs almost exclusively. This allows me to take figure images, rotate, crop, and otherwise manipulate them into compositions that suit my needs. But what starts out as a source photo is almost never the image that I use as the inspiration for a drawing, and it certainly never resembles the final image. There are artists that do work directly from photos and endeavor to match them accurately. I see nothing wrong with this approach, but it doesn't appeal to me. I prefer to let the abstract, gestural aspects of drawing show in the final.

For the following drawing, I selected a figure image that was a particularly appealing form, but changed the value emphasis dramatically from a dark, somewhat murky original to high-key and light. As I often do, I opened a stock photo in Photoshop, cropped it tightly so that when enlarged to 30"x 42" paper size would be larger than life, and then value-shifted it to dramatize the highlights and give the image a sun-drenched feel. The original photo is on the left, and my cropped and adjusted manquette on the right.


Additionally, I had a trio of colors in mind that I accidentally noticed one early dawn while looking out a hotel window in San Francisco. Daylight was emerging and the murky early morning light threw three colors across a hotel down an alley: a deep purple/brown shadow, a light khaki/lime green mid tone and a light pinkish cream highlight. The shadows came to be known in my mind as a "sickening, dull bruise" and the highlights sort of a "thin, washed out Band-Aid". Here is my sample swatch, which I tape to the easel as an initial guide, but more often than not wind up either forgetting, or simply going in a different direction.

Also, my working manquette had a fairly neutral warmish gray beneath the figure, and a very, very pale pink above. But early on, after I had put in the gray under drawing beneath the figure, I decided to scrub it out and let the figure stretch and float on the white sheet. Needless to say, it took considerable scrubbing, several erasers, and about an hour to remove the unnecessary background. The final drawing is below. Unfortunately, a small digital photo cannot possibly render the subtle colors of the original. I am pleased with the result, particularly the combination of the "adjusted" source photo and the "accidental" color palette.