Drawing from online photos isn’t that bad. The hardest part is finding well lit high resolution imagery to draw from. There are a lot of resources online that have high quality figure photos but not many of them are well lit, which is why I’m very glad that I found the New Masters Academy channel on Youtube.
I get a lot of inspiration from the internet, It would be hard for today’s artists to not be influenced by the internet in some way, honestly its a wonderful thing to have all art at your fingertips. This is one reason why I was figure drawing form online photos tonight, and why I was trying out sanguine on my warmup page.
I was watching videos on Youtube by Robert Liberace and I was inspired by the following compilation of him drawing.
For the next few drawings I’m working from the following Youtube video with it set on 4k resolution, full screen on my iMac 26″ screen.
There are a couple of gestures in here that work really well, when I slow down and focus on the big action lines.
I really liked this second 5 minute drawing and how I was not just focusing on the outline of the figure but how the forms transitioned external to internal and trying to create a depth within the body.
I decided to continue this idea in the last drawing on the video, which I also extended for an extra 20 minutes.
I was trying to describe the body with lines that curved over the surface. I didn’t use many straight hatching lines but instead I would curve the hatching lines in a way that I felt best represented the curvature of the leg or the arm.
I started this drawing on newsprint, but I wanted to use a white charcoal to describe the lighter areas and have more value range so I quickly switched to some Strathmore toned paper. Again, I was trying to describe the form as much as possible with lines that curved over the form rather than straight hatching lines that tend to flatten out the forms.
