Monday, September 15, 2008

Portraits in graphite

Finally, all those years of study, not to mention students loans is going to pay off - I'm taking the plunge and offering my services as a portrait artist. Not quite complete web site here.

One of the important points about my work is that I do portraits from life - people sitting right in front of me - not photographs. The idea of drawing a portrait from a photograph is absurd. I was paid by some guy to do that back when I was seventeen and even then I thought it was idiotic. And that was before anybody with access to Photoshop could make any photo look like a watercolor, or a pen-and-ink drawing or a pencil sketch - as you can see in my Photoshopped "self-portrait" below.

But if you do a quick Google, you'll discover that so many people are offering their services drawing from photos. WTF????