At a protest in favor of reproductive rights today in Richmond VA, protesters assembled on the Virginia Capitol’s steps. Police, many in riot gear, demanded that they disperse or be arrested. 33 people refused to leave the steps, and were arrested.
Top picture: The 33 arrestees, shortly before police moved in.
Bottom picture: Protester, identified as Mara Hyman, faces down cops in riot gear.
Mamihlapinatapei (Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego): The wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start. Oh yes, this is an exquisite word, compressing a thrilling and scary relationship moment. It’s that delicious, cusp-y moment of imminent seduction. Neither of you has mustered the courage to make a move, yet. Hands haven’t been placed on knees; you’ve not kissed. But you’ve both conveyed enough to know that it will happen soon… very soon.
Yuanfen(Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the “binding force” that links two people together in any relationship. But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Even if lovers are fated to find each other they may not end up together. The proverb, “have fate without destiny,” describes couples who meet, but who don’t stay together, for whatever reason. It’s interesting, to distinguish in love between the fated and the destined. Romantic comedies, of course, confound the two.
Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair.
Retrouvailles (French): The happiness of meeting again after a long time. This is such a basic concept, and so familiar to the growing ranks of commuter relationships, or to a relationship of lovers, who see each other only periodically for intense bursts of pleasure. I’m surprised we don’t have any equivalent word for this subset of relationship bliss. It’s a handy one for modern life.
Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time. Apparently, in 2004, this word won the award as the world’s most difficult to translate. Although at first, I thought it did have a clear phrase equivalent in English: It’s the “three strikes and you’re out” policy. But ilunga conveys a subtler concept, because the feelings are different with each “strike.” The word elegantly conveys the progression toward intolerance, and the different shades of emotion that we feel at each stop along the way. Ilunga captures what I’ve described as the shade of gray complexity in marriages—Not abusive marriages, but marriages that involve infidelity, for example. We’ve got tolerance, within reason, and we’ve got gradations of tolerance, and for different reasons. And then, we have our limit. The English language to describe this state of limits and tolerance flattens out the complexity into black and white, or binary code. You put up with it, or you don’t. You “stick it out,” or not. Ilunga restores the gray scale, where many of us at least occasionally find ourselves in relationships, trying to love imperfect people who’ve failed us and whom we ourselves have failed.
La Douleur Exquise (French): The heart-wrenching pain of wanting someone you can’t have. When I came across this word I thought of “unrequited” love. It’s not quite the same, though. “Unrequited love” describes a relationship state, but not a state of mind. Unrequited love encompasses the lover who isn’t reciprocating, as well as the lover who desires. La douleur exquise gets at the emotional heartache, specifically, of being the one whose love is unreciprocated.
Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love. This is different than “love at first sight,” since it implies that you might have a sense of imminent love, somewhere down the road, without yet feeling it. The term captures the intimation of inevitable love in the future, rather than the instant attraction implied by love at first sight.
Ya’aburnee(Arabic): “You bury me.” It’s a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them. The online dictionary that lists this word calls it “morbid and beautiful.” It’s the “How Could I Live Without You?” slickly insincere cliché of dating, polished into a more earnest, poetic term.
Forelsket: (Norwegian): The euphoria you experience when you’re first falling in love. This is a wonderful term for that blissful state, when all your senses are acute for the beloved, the pins and needles thrill of the novelty. There’s a phrase in English for this, but it’s clunky. It’s “New Relationship Energy,” or NRE.
Saudade (Portuguese): The feeling of longing for someone that you love and is lost. Another linguist describes it as a “vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist.” It’s interesting that saudade accommodates in one word the haunting desire for a lost love, or for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be-experienced love. Whether the object has been lost or will never exist, it feels the same to the seeker, and leaves her in the same place: She has a desire with no future. Saudade doesn’t distinguish between a ghost, and a fantasy. Nor do our broken hearts, much of the time.
My favorites are Ya’aburnee, Mamihlapinatapei, and La Douleur Exquise. :p
Ya’aburnee is my absolute favourite non-english word. I think I’d love to have it on a gravestone, or on some sort of relationship-related jewelry. It’s so beautiful.
…Really? I realize the frustration of when you are unable to make the deadline. But this is a commission. From someone who likely wants your usual raw skill and finesse. And which does not even have a deadline.
What the hell.
For all the respect I have for you as an artist, this has put an extremely unpleasant stain on your work for me. I do not even know how much work of yours has been done this way, if at all. I do not preach purity as a total and utter standard, but this… Personal art, sketches and one-on-one commissions feel like something that should never see the light of tracing and such folly, they are a statement by the artist to exhibit the best of their talent and there is no reason to take shortcuts, only time.
I was going to commission you for a painting, sketches and maybe a few buttons. Now I dare not because I fear that you will do the same with those, even if I requested you not to, why should I trust you? I’ve never met you myself nor do I know anyone who is your friend.
I’d hate to sound like a preaching ignorant ass, yet I am by default ignorant to the situation thanks to the lack of information presented, but that’s what makes it look cheap and the easy way out. It’s possible they were snappy and said “One week! No less!” and it is just as possible that any of number of things could of happened, but the implication is this is someone looking for a piece of art, by you, not a stock photographer.
I should probably shut my mouth as I am not even an adult yet and you will likely out-logic and hurt me something deep (particularly since you are one of my biggest inspirations and drives to become better), and I will just sit there like the dog I am. But I feel fully inclined to speak about issues which make my innards churn. This is one of those.
allow me, a non-artist third-party observer, to jump in and address some points, because I’m pretty sure the original poster is going to be way more polite than necessary:
- we’re clearly looking at a piece which isn’t even sortof close to being finished, so gnawing on yourself going OH DEAR IT LOOKS CHEAP is ridiculous.
- photographic reference composites are an incredibly long-running artistic tradition, and are in fact mentioned as an established technical aid in the context of a specific (quite famous!) illustrator in the OP. this isn’t even in the same ballpark as “tracing”
- going OH WELL I USED TO RESPECT YOU AND I WAS *GOING* TO BUY STUFF BUT THEN I SAW THIS THING AND NOWWWW to an artist is like, massively insulting. especially when you readily admit that there’s a VERY STRONG POSSIBILITY that you don’t know what you’re talking about. shut up.
- holy shit, shut up. “blah blah, I dare not, blah blahhh verily, my inner churnings, milady.” I can practically hear your pipe and fedora. stop it, for the love of god.
if you’re as young (and presumably inexperienced?) as you say you are, you may want to sit down and actually listen to the people you respect as inspirations in the future rather than taking giant steaming shits on their stuff without the full story. maybe you will learn a new thing! THE POWER IS YOURS.
IN CONCLUSION:
gosh, did demrishtihglsihg actually read the blog entry I linked to, in which I posted Robert McGinnis’ method of making his paintings? Because the moral of that story was: work smarter, not harder.
Allow me to blow your mind, “preaching ignorant ass”:
This is the work of famous pinup artist Gil Elvgren. He is renowned for his aesthetically refined pinup girl paintings which idealized the It Girl of his era(s). These are just three of his source-photo-to-finished-work side-by-sides, but there are dozens more of them here: http://ulkacurl.livejournal.com/212899.html
I don’t know if he used McGinnis’ method of projection, or other tracing, during his drawing, or if he just eyed his reference pretty hard, but I’m guessing it was a mixture of both. The precise working methods of these illustrators is hard to research, since most laypeople don’t give a shit, so they don’t write books about it, and sometimes the artists aren’t willing to tip their hands. Likely because the cries of “cheap!” will ring out from people who think photo reference taken in the artists’ own studios is “cheating”.
Everyone who’s interested in illustration is probably already familiar with Franz Mucha. He produced much of his work at the turn of the century, when photography was still just getting popular. There must have been a brief period of ease and happiness for illustrators, after photographic reference suddenly became available, but before it was practical or stylish to replace illustrations in publications with photographs. Lucky.
Anyway, in the second example you can see Mucha has overlaid the reference photo with an enlarging grid, another old-as-the-hills method that people like to shit on by calling “cheap”.
Here’s another cheap art trick, also using a grid:
Albrecht Durer, Draughtsman Drawing a Recumbent Woman. 1525
See the date on that? 15-motherfucking-25, dude. If you’re like me, you’ve always seen this image without the accompanying title, and wondered what the fuck was going on there. Primitive gynecology? A monk so embarrassed by his tryst with a local dairymaid that he makes her recline on the other side of a confessing screen? The mind reels. What’s actually happening—as the title made apparent, finally—is that this dude is straight up cheating at art. He’s drawing the intensely foreshortened form of the woman—with clinical precision—using a tool that would come to be known as the Durer Grid. As on her grid, so on his grid. He proceeds square by square, making sure the placement of lines and forms is accurate, thereby conquering one of the most difficult subjects an artist will ever face: the foreshortened human nude.
But…that’s cheap!!!
Wait, it gets worse.
You know Johannes Vermeer, right? Guy who did Girl With a Pearl Earring, and all those incredibly realistic, depthy, beautifully-painted pictures of interior Dutch life in the 1600s? Yes, well. Prepare to put “an extremely unpleasant stain” on all his work:
This is a camera obscura, one of many different designs on the same principle. It’s essentially a backwards projector: the lens takes in whatever it’s pointed at, and then projects it on a surface where it can be traced. There is no hard documentary evidence that Vermeer used such a thing, but he was friends with a lot of artists who did use them, and had the sort of acquaintances from which he could easily get the parts. The intense perspective in his paintings was totally unknown at the time, and so clinically precise that the likelihood of his using an obscura is strong. The BBC says:
For more than a hundred years, it has been suggested that the great 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer made use of the camera obscura as an aid to painting. The camera obscura was the predecessor of the photographic camera, but without the light-sensitive film or plate. It is well established that in the 18th century some other famous painters employed the device, the best-known being Canaletto, whose own camera obscura survives in the Correr Museum in Venice. The English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds owned a camera; and the device was widely used by landscape artists, both professional and amateur, up until the invention of chemical photography in the 1830s.
That’s nothing, though. Da Vinci probably used one, too.
Let’s fast-forward to the cheap tricks of the modern day, starting with photographic retouching.
You may be familiar with Richard Avedon, the renowned art and fashion photographer. This is one of his prints, marked up for extensive dodging and burning, as well as some airbrushing. There’s a public assumption, particularly by non-artists but sometimes by artists as well, that once you become “good enough”, you stop having to use “tricks” like retouching.
That’s backwards.
What makes you “good enough” is learning those “tricks” in the first place.
In terms of “ideological purity”, this:
Joan Crawford, by Geoge Hurrell, date unknown (mid-century)
Is no different from this:
unknown photographer/model, likely early 2000s
Is no different from this:
Gil Elvgren’s reference photos again
Is no different from this:
Photograph of Young Queen Victoria vs. Idealized Painting of Young Queen Victoria (notice eyes, nose, skin, lack of jowls, etc), ~1800s (note also that young Victoria looked exactly like Jodie Foster)
Allow me to use an example from the cutting edge of modern commercial art/illustration: environmental concept art. Particularly urban environmental art.
In this video from the Massive Black Concept Art tutorial DVDs, renowned concept artist Whit Brachna explains his working method for making haunting environmental concept art. When I first watched this DVD I was almost angry, because Brachna did something so incredibly clever that it felt like he was “cheating”: he doesn’t painstakingly draw out his industrial environment using perspective grids and horizon lines and so on. Nope, he builds it in Google Sketchup, then paints on top of the 3d model. And if he’s anything like the other concept artists I know, he probably didn’t build all the individual model assets himself, either. Sketchup has a massive library of free-to-use models of everything from people and animals to tanks and guns to entire buildings, and professional illustrators use those things, buddy.
You know who else paints on top of 3d models? Lots of people.
This guy, the artist Randis, whose work you have probably already seen. The image above really made the rounds. Which it should, because it’s quite good.
Let me tell you something else: the professionals poke a lot of fun at the smug wannabes on the various digital art forums who like to strut around crowing about nonsensical bullshit they think is important: it’s common to see art in these forums posted with notation like “this only took me 5 hours in Photoshop CS5, no ref”, as if that’s something anyone should be bragging about. You mean you chose to do everything the hard way, sacrificing the quality of the finished product to some miscalibrated internal “ideal” of how a drawing “should be” done? That’s not something to trumpet about, dude. And the pros are making fun of you for it. Snickering “no ref” when talking about art was a surefire injoke amidst students and faculty.
And this is why:
Frank Gutbrod is an artist on DeviantArt, and has this to say about the example above:
This is how much impact the use of reference makes. Only two days ago i would be looking at the upper pictures hand and think stuff like ” Well, this is a pretty good hand for my standards. Pretty much one of the best i did so far from mind/imagination/memory. I like it.”
Sweet stupid me.
The lower picture shows what i was and still am working on today while using some photo reference I shoot earlier the evening. It’s just miles and leagues beyond the other one. And this is even though there are still tons of mistakes in it.
Looking at the other thing I dont really think it is good work anymore. I only feel the urgent wish to rework it and bring it on level with the new work.
Will you always NEED to use ref, for every picture? No, of course not. And oddly enough, the more you use ref to start with (particularly drawing from living models), the less you’ll have to, later on. You draw enough real bodies and eventually they form a sort of visual library in your head that can be called upon at any time, meaning that picture-making in general becomes much easier.
Do I know of any working professional artists or illustrators who work totally without reference at all times? No. All of them use it, for various things, at various times, for their own reasons, to get the best image they can get. Robert McGinnis could draw, paint and sketch plenty good without his projection method, which is why his stuff doesn’t look stilted or unsure. He uses his “cheap tricks” to make his shit flawless, adjusting the reference as he goes to suit the picture he’s trying to make. If you think there’s anything wrong with that, you’re an idiot.
Okay so, where do I draw the line? When are paintovers and tracing and reference actually a bad thing? I say, use your own photography or photography that has been specifically donated for the purpose. And if your reference is not your own photography, make sure you’re using it in such a way as the original photograph is not recognizable, but becomes part of a continuous gestalt within the image.
For the OP image, I set up my model and took dozens of photos of him based on the thumbnail the client had chosen. That’s what they fucking hired me for: to give them the best painting it was in my abilities to give, in a reasonable timeframe, that adhered to their aesthetic wishes. Photographing models for reference is a tool, and it’s a tool you better learn to embrace if you really want to move past the “terrible art” you claim to create in your Tumblr bio.
I’m going to close with a series of further examples from your own blog.
This is a digital paintover of a TF2 screenshot, probably from Gmod. It’s still a good image! The irony of you having posted this with the words “Oh my yes.” not long before you freaked out about my reference photos is not lost on you, I hope.
Desolee is one talented painter and consistently turns out good fan art, particularly of Spy. But they posted a step-by-step recently that demonstrated their consistent use of photo reference (which is obvious, just looking at their work), and that reference is how they get this realism. You should take a look at it. You might learn something.
Then there’s this thing, which is clearly a very basic vectorization of three photographs: meat, tank and naked woman. However, you seem to have approved of it when you posted it.
In conclusion, professional artists use reference. They use Photoshop, projectors, tracing, Liquify, Google Sketchup, Gmod, and whatever the h*ck else they need to use in order to make the goddamn picture. You do them, and yourself, a disservice by thinking otherwise.
