A drawing is not a photograph!

I dis­like say­ing hate­ful things about oth­er artists or their art­work. I real­ly do. I believe that any­one who puts their time and ener­gy into cre­at­ing some­thing rather than into idle con­sump­tion deserves respect. Even when I am unmoved by the art­work, it is to be laud­ed for the skill and effort expend­ed even in cre­at­ing dis­plays of tech­nique with lit­tle else to rec­om­mend them.

On the oth­er hand, I have some of the skills in ques­tion and a per­spec­tive that many do not. I know how easy it is to fall back on the worka­holic myth that more work and more hours expend­ed equals bet­ter results. No doubt there are instances where more time and effort are nec­es­sary to cre­ate some­thing fan­tas­tic, but the con­verse is not true. Throw­ing time and ener­gy at something—especially artwork—is not by itself suf­fi­cient to make it good. Yet the temp­ta­tion remains when a draw­ing has very lit­tle going for it to give it addi­ton­al detail or embell­ish­ment in hopes that no one will look any deep­er than at the sur­face technique.

Hav­ing, as I do, the sense that cov­er­ing for lack of con­cept with tech­nique is a sort of cheat, I am both­ered and even annoyed by artists who pro­duce pho­to­re­al­is­tic draw­ings. The work of these artists will often come to my atten­tion through email or online forum dis­cus­sions. The claim that such and such an artist makes draw­ings that look «just like pho­tographs» is made with aston­ish­ment and awe. You can find prints of draw­ings like these all over Etsy.com and every now and again in fluff pieces in the news.

Often these draw­ings do look impres­sive­ly like pho­tographs, but I have a prob­lem with the asser­tion that the human hand imi­tat­ing a mechan­i­cal process is an achieve­ment to be desired. It is like com­pli­ment­ing some­one on a new suit by telling him he looks as though he were dressed by an under­tak­er. Under­tak­ers take great care to dress corpses well, but one would­n’t be flat­tered by the impli­ca­tion that he looks as though he were dead.

To make things worse, often these artis­tic prodi­gies pro­duce work that looks not like a fine-art pho­to­graph or good pho­to­jour­nal­ism, but rather like care­less snap­shots. Cute kids, dogs, smil­ing peo­ple reclin­ing on a couch lit by the harsh, flat light of a cheap flash—if I would­n’t want to look at a pho­to­graph of some­one’s back­yard bar­beque, why would I want to look at a draw­ing of a pho­to­graph of some­one’s back­yard barbeque?

Inevitably these draw­ings are made using stip­pling. Stip­pling, the tech­nique of cre­at­ing the illu­sion of tone by putting irreg­u­lar­ly-spaced dots on the paper, is not draw­ing. Draw­ings are made with lines; the artist draws the pen across the paper, leav­ing a line behind. Stip­pling, by con­trast, is pok­ing at the paper. Draw­ings should have lines.

I should men­tion that I do use stip­pling in my work. I may take a hard line (no pun intend­ed) about stip­pling, but it is a use­ful tech­nique. Cre­at­ing images with a pen neces­si­tates the cre­ation of a wide vari­ety of tex­tures. Some tex­tures are best rep­re­sent­ed with stip­pling. It can also be used for dra­mat­ic effect. One of the ways in which con­trast can be cre­at­ed is by vary­ing the tech­nique. A hatched fig­ure in the fore­ground and a stip­pled back­ground will cause the fore­ground to stand out even if the val­ues are sim­i­lar. Shad­ows in sand, for exam­ple, are often best depict­ed with stip­pling. Even though I con­sid­er the tech­nique to be some­thing of a cheat, I do use it when I think it is appropriate.

Stip­pling is the best way to cre­ate an impres­sion of soft focus or to repro­duce an out-of-focus ele­ment of a pho­to­graph. Nat­u­ral­ly, if one wants to repro­duce a pho­to­graph using only pen and ink the way to do it is with stippling.

Lines are unfor­giv­ing, but dots are very for­giv­ing. Put a few extra dots down and you prob­a­bly haven’t ruined your pic­ture. A few extra lines will like­ly require a lot of work to cov­er over. This means that it is rel­a­tive­ly easy to pro­duce some­thing that looks flaw­less with stip­pling. When draw­ing, every mis­take shows.

Com­pound­ing my dis­like for these pho­to­re­al­is­tic pen and ink images is the great dif­fer­ence in visu­al lan­guage between draw­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy. Many of the basic ideas of com­po­si­tion are shared between them, but almost all of the ways in which objects are rep­re­sent­ed are fun­da­men­tal­ly unre­lat­ed. The ways in which the view­er’s atten­tion is direct­ed are dif­fer­ent, the ways of reduc­ing detail from sup­port­ing ele­ments of a com­po­si­tion are dif­fer­ent but most of all, pho­tog­ra­phy requires a total­ly dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at a sub­ject than drawing.

The process of look­ing through a lens and shift­ing point of view, posi­tion, and zoom is not the same as build­ing an image from a blank slate on paper with ink or graphite. The sub­jects of draw­ings are cre­at­ed delib­er­ate­ly by the artist rather than cho­sen (also, one hopes, delib­er­ate­ly) by the pho­tog­ra­ph­er. The rela­tion­ship between the frame and the sub­ject devel­ops in a dif­fer­ent sequence. There­fore, even giv­en the same sub­ject mat­ter and themes, what makes a good pho­to­graph and what makes a good draw­ing are only some­what related.

Using pen and ink to repro­duce a pho­to­graph then seems like a fool’s errand not because it is so dif­fi­cult, but because despite the effort it is des­tined to cre­ate a mediocre result.

Begin­ning artists are fre­quent­ly cau­tioned about the use of ref­er­ence pho­tographs, and for good rea­son. When a sin­gle pho­to­graph is used as a ref­er­ence, draw­ings can end up look­ing life­less and flat. In addi­tion to the rea­sons list­ed above about the dif­fer­ences between the process­es and visu­al lan­guages of pho­tog­ra­phy and draw­ing, ref­er­ence pho­tographs fail to pro­vide all the clues need­ed to make a draw­ing look alive and to make objects look sol­id and real. You can’t step around the sub­ject to see whether a wall has a sharp or round­ed cor­ner with a ref­er­ence pho­to­graph. You can’t look behind objects to get a bet­ter sense of the back­ground with a ref­er­ence pho­to­graph. Indi­cat­ing weight, mass, and shape becomes very dif­fi­cult if stick­ing too close to what the pho­to­graph tells you.

Of course I rely heav­i­ly on ref­er­ence pho­tographs in my work, so I am not sug­gest­ing that any­one aban­don their use entire­ly. Rather, I want to point out the traps and pit­falls so that the read­er may more effec­tive­ly side­step them.

There’s a lot more that I need to do in my own work to avoid the unwant­ed influ­ence of my pho­tog­ra­phy. There are steps that can be tak­en and I don’t always take them. But when I haven’t my work has always suf­fered for it.

1. Always use your own pho­tographs as ref­er­ence. I almost nev­er use oth­er peo­ple’s pho­tographs for sev­er­al rea­sons. First is that if I’m on the scene myself, my first impres­sion of the sub­ject comes from direct expe­ri­ence. It has been said that there is no sub­sti­tute for a first impres­sion, and I want my first impres­sions to be from life. The things that might attract my atten­tion are out­side my con­trol if I am not stand­ing before my sub­ject; my atten­tion will fol­low the com­po­si­tion already cre­at­ed if my first expo­sure is some­one else’s pho­to­graph. Sec­ond is that copy­right issues get tricky when using some­one else’s pho­tog­ra­phy, even as ref­er­ence. There are ways to pro­tect one­self legal­ly, but ulti­mate­ly the rea­son behind copy­right law is impor­tant here. My aim is to cre­ate my own orig­i­nal work. Unless I am inten­tion­al­ly cre­at­ing homage to anoth­er artist, I want every­thing on the page to be my own.
   The only time I will use oth­er peo­ple’s pho­tographs is when absolute­ly nec­es­sary, for exam­ple if I need to por­tray a deceased indi­vid­ual or a neigh­bor­hood at a long-gone point in his­to­ry. Occa­sion­al­ly I’ll use google to find pho­tos if there is a sin­gle detail miss­ing or unclear from the pho­tographs I’ve already taken.
2. Always take mul­ti­ple pho­tos of the same sub­ject. Even if I’m cer­tain I’ve nailed the com­po­si­tion in the pho­to, a cou­ple pho­tos from the left and right of the posi­tion will give me valu­able infor­ma­tion about dis­tance, scale, shape and even obscured items behind my sub­ject. If I’m tak­ing ref­er­ence pho­tos of a sub­ject from far away, I’ll vis­it the site and take a num­ber of pho­tos at close range to get a bet­ter han­dle on details, tex­tures and so on.
3. Bring your sketch­book to the pho­to shoot. I don’t always do this but I should. Noth­ing is bet­ter for fig­ur­ing out how to draw some­thing in the stu­dio than draw­ing it in per­son. Even when I don’t make ref­er­ence sketch­es on-site, I will write down notes for lat­er reference.
4. Don’t be afraid to devi­ate. If you have a choice between an accu­rate copy of the pho­to­graph and a draw­ing you’ll be proud of, for­get accu­ra­cy. In fact, for­get accu­ra­cy alto­geth­er. The pho­to­graph is a tool at your dis­pos­al to be used when it helps you. It is not the final author­i­ty over your drawing.
5. Know your lens­es. Tele­pho­to lens­es flat­ten images. Wide-angle lens­es dis­tort oth­er­wise straight lines. (Of course, if you aren’t aware that your own eye dis­torts straight lines, I sug­gest you start pay­ing more atten­tion to what you’re see­ing!) Depend­ing on the cam­era to give you the per­spec­tive you want for your draw­ing is dan­ger­ous. Some things sim­ply won’t make sense in a draw­ing, though they may look nat­ur­al in a photograph.

These are some ways to avoid some of the com­mon pit­falls of using ref­er­ence pho­tographs in draw­ing. It’s cer­tain­ly not a com­plete list. And it’s not enough to just gussy up a pho­to­graph­ic com­po­si­tion with some draw­ing tricks.

What makes a draw­ing special—what makes it a drawing—is the evi­dence of the human hand. That does­n’t have to mean gross vari­ance from real­i­ty and it does­n’t mean throw­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al art out the win­dow. What it does mean is let­ting the draw­ing be a draw­ing. As artists we make deci­sions about every mark that goes onto the paper. The chal­lenge is to make every stroke of the pen some­thing to be proud of. Whether with sim­ple, ele­gant, flow­ing strokes, jagged ener­getic lines, metic­u­lous hatch­ing, con­tour lines, or car­toony out­lines the style must match the artist’s intent, the sub­jec­t’s per­son­al­i­ty and the artist’s own tem­pera­ment. The lines cho­sen con­sti­tute the artist’s voice.

Stip­pling to achieve a pho­to­re­al­ist effect makes for an amus­ing nov­el­ty, but the state­ment it makes about the artist is that she or he is a slave to a machine. It is as though one were to hold the out­put of a com­put­er­ized speech syn­the­siz­er up as the pin­na­cle of ora­to­ry style. Entire­ly stip­pled pho­to­re­al­is­tic «draw­ings» say to me that the artist, how­ev­er skilled, refus­es to find his or her voice. It is a cheap short­cut to tech­ni­cal­ly impres­sive work with­out hav­ing to make any of the deci­sions that are the hall­mark of the artist’s skill. Nev­er sell your­self short as an artist. I want to see what your hand can do!