Quote:
Originally Posted by blankall
With the exception of abstract artists, most artists will work from a photo. You can sit for a portrait, but as that would take days, the vast majority of artists will just use a photo. As long as he's not tracing, I don't see why that's a negative.
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To me most other portraits (say oil paintings) offer an improvement/addition to the original. The artist will select colours/shades that are close to the original, but not exact, they'll remove blemishes & generally try to paint the subject in the best light possible.
I think most people commissioning portraits want something that is better than the source material. Something that has the human touch of brush on paper, not an exact reproduction.
Let's just put it this way, if you were in a gallery and you fell in love with a photo to the point that you're going to buy it. Would you pay twice as much to have a virtually identical copy of the photo but drawn in ball point?
Like I said originally, it just doesn't feel like anything is added to the source by working this way. But I could be wrong, maybe he's working at massive sizes and the work is just mind blowing at 3' x 4', or in person there's qualities just not present in the scanned image. But it still feels a little sterile when compared to the source material.