Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Does anybody really think this sort of thing IS cheating? Maybe non-illustrators believe artists should draw everything "out of their head," but illustrators? I mean, if DaVinci hired models for the Last Supper, I think using reference should be good enough for the rest of us, too.
Thanks for the link!

There's contention all around that drawing from photos is "cheating." It used to be via lightbox and now via digital photos and a Wacom. From my point of view, it's not so much cheating as it is shattering the image of an artist as a creator. DaVinci may have used models, but he wasn't tracing paintings of Botticelli or Ghirlandaio, was he? (I don't know, he may have.)

It's a fine, blurry, porous gray line between what's considered reference and what's considered cheating. I think a lot of artists work very hard to understand how to draw especially the human body and a lot of comic book artists spend even more time trying to learn how to work faster. To find out that people have some how abused that tradition by using photographs as a template can be shocking. It illustrates that you don't HAVE to know how to draw, you just have to know how to take a picture and use some software.

Means to an end to be sure, and I agree that this level of artistic output is unrivaled anywhere, but I think the potency of that work loses some of it's glamor when you realize how they accomplish it. Personally, I'd rather have a more stylized, cartoony look that super realistic. But that's me. What's to stop people from taking digital photos and just drawing in backgrounds and overlaying the human poses with costumes in photoshop?

The idea that drawing from/over a photo is some kind of magic bullet to great-looking art overlooks what the artist actually adds or subtracts to IMPROVE on the photo: detail, line quality, slight adjustments to anatomy or composition, line quality, tone, texture, line quality, colour/lack of colour, and, oh yeah, line quality. Anyone can improve a deficit in skill/talent by using a photo, but fewer can surpass the photo. Too much adherence to the photo generally ends up looking like crap - it is necessary to have the skills it takes to see where and how to compensate for what a photo lacks.

"What’s to stop people from taking digital photos and just drawing in backgrounds and overlaying the human poses with costumes in photoshop?"

Nothing. That's exactly what guys like Greg Land do. The difference is, there's tracing (like Land) and there's photo reference (like Stuart.)

From Comic Book Artist #11, 2001, in an interview with artist Alex Toth:

"To sum up: collect all fotos (I like the euro-phoneticall-spelled version-'foto') to document/ authenticate a piece of work (illo, strip, book story, cover, etc.) Study 'em -- yes -- learn to 'read' fotos, focusing only on critical 'needed' detail. Since 1839 -- or 1861 -- painters/impressionists used fotos as a tool, in France/Europe... Monet to Degas to later Mucha and Klimt and more. (...)

But, too many cartoonists fell slave to fotos -- their work went dead, lifeless, like corpses or wax dummies, the faces and
figures drawn from fotos! They posed for their own fotos -- the 'Polaroid'-ers!!! Fotos used *them*, not the reverse! Shame! I loathe Alex Ross well-painted but so redundant/boring/lifeless/stiff/pretty/non-continuity-savvy comic book art!!! Idiot savant -- hasn't learned a damn thing yet!!!"

Alex goes into great detail, continuing on the subject... one of the most interesting interviews ever, by the way!

I agree with what Stuart Immonen wrote, "I don’t think there’s another job in the commercial arts field which is similarly demanding." I have a friend who is a comic book artist and who works around the clock. He still doesn't seem to make his deadlines. It's definitely not from trying. I don't know how he does it. I'd burn out if I had to work that hard.

Huh. So I guess there ARE illustrators who think it's cheating, or at least disappointing.
Xadrian–No, I don't think DaVinci traced any Boticellis, and I don't think Immonen traced this photo either. It's obvious he didn't, just as it's obvious he has the chops to draw quite well without reference if need be. As others have implied on this thread, you need real skill as an illustrator to take photo reference and use it without being slavish to it. If you really believe all this shows that one doesn't "HAVE to know how to draw, you just have to know how to take a picture and use some software," then I'm confused as to how to convince you otherwise.
And I think it bears mentioning that simply being able to compose a scene effectively, be it through photograpy or pencil and paper, is a huge part of the craft of illustration in the first place. You can give a lot of people a camera and they still can't make a nice picture.

I've been thinking about this and...hypothetically, you do NOT have to trace 3D to use 3D in your art work. Think of it as your own personal lego set that you can photograph instantly from any view you want. And with the Sketch-up warehouse, you can use all these great little miniatures that all these other people made as well.

I've been on the fence on this one, and I've finally come to the conclusion that I really hate perspective drawing, and that I don't have to render the hell out of everything to benefit from this. I think, if used in combination with other stuff---photo ref, and hopefully your own drawing ability---you're backgrounds don't have to look obviously CG.

I think.

I haven't tried this yet. I've just started messing with Sketchup and have really been having a good time with it. It's a VERY intuitive program. So, you know, I guess I'll let you know how that works out...

I won't get suckered into the 'cheating' debate but, come on, did Jack Kirby or Charles Schulz ever miss a deadline or count the number of drawings they had to do in a year in order to justify their methods?

Yeah, I wish Immonen hadn't gone to the trouble to justify his methods at all. It seems to imply he has some sense of shame about them, when as far as I'm aware he's only using the same sort of techniques and reference as every other successful illustrator with a style grounded in realism. Every illustrator I know, at any rate.

I guess what it comes down to for me is: is the image successful or not? If so, it's likely due to a great composition, or an appealing style, or a very sensitive rendering, or all three. You can't "Cheat" on that stuff. You can still pull out all your knowledge and training and refuse to use reference of any kind, and maybe you'll produce something that couldn't be improved with reference. Or you can shoot and or collect good reference, and use all that same knowledge and training to create something new that's informed by the reference but also modified, exaggerated, idealized, stylized, or whatever. I kind of expect that Immonen would use some or all of these same methods, even if he had twice the time and half the work. He'd do it because he wants to produce the best work possible. But I can't speak for him, and of course I have no idea.
Anyway, I shoot reference all the time, collect (but not copy) images from books and the web when I can't shoot my own, and sculpt busts of characters that I plan to render from various angles. It hasn't occurred to me before now to be ashamed of this. Hell, I post pictures of the sculptures on my website.

By the way, regarding that Kirby and Schulz comment–I love both artists dearly, but neither was particularly known for their realism. They were known for qualities of emotion or dynamism that are, honestly, a lot more enduring. But does that mean there isn't a place for more realistic draftsmanship? I guess I don't understand the comment.

Sorry to be a crank about this. I just finished teaching a class and was frustrated by a few graduating senior illustration students that steadfastly resisted doing any research or shooting reference. They just tried to cover up drawing problems with a lot of Photoshop texture. So this topic was already on my mind.

Yeah, the blurry photoshop texture thing doesn't hide anything. Dave McKean gets away with it because he can DRAW!

However---I think over dependance on 3d stuff can take the expressionistic verve out of your drawings, if that's your tendency. You lose the ideocyncratic (sp?) quality of something observed, rather than copied or rendered. But that's if you're going for a less rendery look.

Maintaining fidelity to your reference, especially if from multiple sources, can only be a good thing if you're going for realism. It all depends on what you're after.

At the moment, I'm just really digging messing around with Sketchup. I like the use friendly simplicity of it, and am envisioning all kinds of uses for it.

And I don't fault Immonen for bringing up deadlines as a reason for his relliance (not dependance) on computers. Illustration is a business. A lot of people use computers to save time, to meet deadlines, to shorten the distance between time spent on a project and income earned from that project. In your own time you can noodle away on a piece forever, but regular and pressing deadlines require you to be more efficient if you want to have a life. Its the reality of being in the business of making art that is ultimately to be used for a commercial purpose. I don't think it's a wimpy admission to say, "deadlines are a signifigant part of the reason I work this way". Years ago, the same thing might have easily been said about acrylics vs. oils. It's very hard to make a living making art and you can't deny the reality of the necessity to produce.

Now that certainly doen't mean deadlines are the ONLY reason Immonen works this way, and of course you always want to make the best work possible under the circumstances. And you can't deny that if you have more time to do something you might have a different working method than when when you have less---a method that very well might include computers, but deadlines DO effect working methods.

You know, a roughly 8 hour a day, 5 day work week isn't a bad thing to aspire to, give or take a weekend.

Very interesting that people use "photographic" and "realistic" interchangeably. In fact every camera lens portrays the real world in warped ways, compared to actual eyeballs in space. This is why we can so often tell when a drawing was done from a photograph. A lot of distortions we take for granted in 20th C art/comics, such as worm-eye views, are related to familiarity with how cameras see. Meanwhile, some distortions that have enjoyed fads in art of the past have disappeared now that art is so often used/enjoyed via a reproduction rather than a physical encounter. For instance, anamorphosis, where you have to walk past the painting at an angle to see the image.

I'm getting the feeling that many of us are basically aguing for the same ideas, but think we're disagreeing because each of us is thinking about a different kind of work, a different area of illustration, or using terms to mean different things. The last couple posts seem to be arguing points that I'm not. I certainly don't believe a person should "maintain fidelity" to reference, for example. You should maintain fidelity to your vision, and use reference insomuch as it enables you to get closer to that vision. You should veer away from the reference when it doesn't, just as Immonen did in the example above.

I assume that when Jed mentions 3d above, that he means the products of 3d modeling and rendering software or something, since he states that such reference is not as good as something observed (which would, presumably, be 3d). I've never used any 3d software, but I'll always take real life over a virtual model of it. I consider real life to also be "reference," however, and I don't think that term means the same thing to everyone else in this discussion. I also think we're all using terms like "copied," "rendered," in slightly different ways.

Anyway, I also tailor my working methods due to time and money constraints–who doesn't? If I have to paint a knight on a horse, I gather old drawings and photos of armor and tackle, photos of horses in different positions, I probably set up a small horse model to look at, and finally I probably shoot a photo of myself or a friend posing in the same manner as my sketch. Then I use a little of all of that reference at the same time, make some stuff up entirely, and readjust things like lighting and form as I combine it all in my head. If I had all the time and money in the world I'd hire a professional model, rent a horse, have armor and tackle made to my specifications, dress everyone, then have horse and rider stand there in an appropriate setting while I painted them. But that, by my definition, would still be "using reference," and I'd still make changes in my head if reality didn't quite live up to my expectations.

Anyway, I have nothing against Immonen. I think he's awesome. I just worry about all the high school and college age people reading this and thinking "real" illustrators or cartoonists make everything up. That, while working on their comic they never shoot reference or look at a model, not even for a really difficult pose. That, if given an assignent to paint Tony Blair they do it from memory or something. Anyone who looks at my work will hopefully understand that I'm not talking about taking a photo and copying it as closely as possible in oils. It would be impossible to get good reference for most of what I do, but I use it whenever I can. In fact, I tend to feel guilty when I DON'T use reference, but could have–my end result might look passable, but it bothers me when I know I could have done it better, but deadline pressures persuaded me not to set up some reference material.

Point taken about "realism" and "photo-realism".

Like you said, I don't think we're really arguing here.

What I meant by fidelity to your reference was fidelity as in: not being slavish to the photo (I mentioned multiple sources), but using reference for signifigant and important details, like the armor you're mentioning. Not overgeneralized. Realism not as in photo realism, but probably more accurately, naturalism. Or at least that's what I meant by "fidelity". Whether it's the gesture of a figure or the detail of particular kind of car or hat.

As for using 3d software as an aid: I meant that using 3d models as a reference in combination with other reference---like you might use your horse model as reference, for instance---has a different look than if you were to trace or render something entirely on the computer and install it into your image. I'd think, the ideal use of 3d software for me, personally, as a tool, would be to use it to plot out perspective, maybe position a few models of more geometry based stuff, like cars and buildings, and then use photo ref and my imagination for the rest.

With my own work, there's a certain ammount of expressionism that would be lost if I were to render and trace buildings and cars and so forth from 3d models outright and plunk them into my images, no matter how much I ellaborated on them with photo ref afterwards. If the foundation was a traced model, it would be jarringly contradictory to the way I draw figures. So my ideal use of the tool would be to use it as if it were just another photograph I'd made of a toy car or airplane, used in conjunction with other reference.

That sounds about right. You and Immonen definitely have me interested in Sketchup now. I wish I'd been more familiar with it a few weeks ago when I was drawing a lot of cityscapes from above. I have no love for perspective drawing, either. I've learned how to do it, I can do it the old-fashioned way if need be, now give me a tool so I never have to do it again.

Sketchup is easy and a lot of fun and free! And the 3d warehouse is great. It's like having a huge collection of simple toy cars and planes and boats and doll furniture. It's a wonderful and growing shared resource, and there are some surprisingly detailed models of very specific cars and planes and other miscelaneous stuff.

I did find that Sketchup 6 was acting glitchy on my mac, so I downloaded Sketchup 5 instead, and haven't had any problems, though it's missing a few of the features of Sketchup 6, and you can't use models created on Sketchup 6.

Another thing I discovered that seemed pretty cool was some of the landmark models. I found a great scale model of the Bay Bridge, and if I ever had a need to draw the bay bridge, I could use this model to easily draw it from any direction. If I were to do this I'd use photos of the real Bay Bridge in conjunction with the model, and draw pretty freely from there.

I've long been resistant to using 3D software, but Sketchup has really sold me on the idea, and I love the fact that people share their toys.

Way late to this conversation, but here's my 2 cents: Norman Rockwell relied heavily on a balopticon through a major portion of his career, much to the chagrin of his mentor J.C. Leyendecker. Are you going to fault Rockwell for his output, work ethic, and style? Who cares?!? Do what looks good, feels right, and makes you happy -- as long as you are not blatantly ripping off someone elses work.
If more comic artists were like Immonen, the current standard of overlate comics would be gone, but that's another conversation altogether.