Drawing from photo reference Pt. 2: Manipulating Imagery (Patreon)

So, you have your photograph to work from, what next? (you don’t? Check back to Part 1. for some tips on gathering reference material).

Before you start drawing directly from your photo reference, check whether there is anything you can do to the photograph itself to make it an easier to tackle or to make it a more engaging or personal subject. If, like me, you retain a lingering notion that altering an image before you work from it is in some way cheating then let go of that now. Manipulating your photo refence can become an integral part of your artistic process and will help to spark new ideas, create incidental effects and make photographic imagery more authentically your own. In this article I’m going to explore different ways to alter physical or digital photos before drawing or painting from them. I’ll talk a lot about altering digital images so whether you do that on a smartphone or tablet (using the edit function) or a use a dedicated photo editing programme like photoshop, it is worth spending a little time on YouTube to learn more about the software you are using. A word to the wise - it is always a good habit to save an unedited version of the photo before you start playing around with it.

Main image: Pixelated portait by Milo Hartnoll (Oil painting, painted from a digitally pixilated photograph taken and edited by the artist)

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This is a reference article – you’ll always be able to find it on our navigator page here. Feel free to dip into it as often as you like, skipping to the parts relevant to you and your work.

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Changing Saturation

Colour has three dimensions – tone, hue and saturation. Saturation accounts for the brightness or intensity of a colour from bright (saturated), through a gradient of duller (less saturated) versions of the same hue to a neutral grey (de-saturated).

Increasing saturation - increasing the saturation of colours in your reference photo can help to reveal colours that you might want to pull out in your painting – this can be really helpful for anybody who struggles to see varied colours when painting skin.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Virgile / Image 2: Image with increased saturation & altered colour balance / Image 3: Coloured pencil drawing made from reference photo

Decreasing saturation - partially decreasing the saturation of an image evokes the aesthetic of a historical photograph and full desaturation means reducing the photo to its tonal values alone – black, greys and white. If you’re planning to make a black and white image, desaturating the photo first will make the visual translation easier.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Jade / Image 2: Desaturated version of original reference / Image 3: Graphite pencil drawing from desaturated image

Changing Tones

Tonal contrast is a powerful emotive tool - whether you are starting with a full colour photo or a black and white image, adjusting its the balance of light and dark nudge it in all sorts of different direction before you start to draw from it. Your editing tools will affect what you can do with an image – smart phones will have pre-set editing tools while dedicated editing programmes will give you more control but will be less intuitive. Play and experiment to – try editing the same image in a variety of different ways and make drawings from all of the different versions to find out what you enjoy working from. While you can’t change the shape of the shadows and highlights themselves, you can change alter their respective tones and contrasts.

High key/low key – low key images are characterised by predominantly darker tones,  high key images by predominantly lighter tones. While a lot of figure drawing reference tends towards high contrast lighting, that won’t always be the effect you are looking for in your reference.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Immie / Image 2: High Key version, lightened using by adjusting curves on photoshop / Image 3: Low key version, darkened by adjusting brightness

Chiaroscuro – all photo reference will be different, but with the Draw photo reference we deliberately provide images that have a clear, directional light source but preserve detail within the shadows, so that you can choose to edit the reference to create more dramatic lighting. Changing the tone of the background will often help to bring out contrasts in the figure.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Tilli / Image 2: Brightness & contrast adjusted to darken shadows and lighten highlights / Image 3: Background isolated from the figure and darkened further to create more contrast with highlights.

Changing Hues

Hue describes the family that a colour belongs to – the stripe it occupies in the rainbow spectrum of visible light.

Isolating Hues - changing saturation will give you brighter or duller versions of the starting colour, changing hue means retaining the same saturation and tone while changing its colour family. This is something we do intuitively in paintings all the time, changing the colour of this t-shirt or that sofa by simply picking a different tube colour to paint it with. Editing the photo beforehand offers another tool for making it easier to find the colour you want. In a series of illustrations that I made for Derwent Pencils I wanted to use a different predominant colour in each drawing. Priss kindly posed for one of those drawings and posed for a series of reference photos at my studio. As she was getting ready to leave she put on some fantastically pink headphones – I snapped a quick photo of her wearing them before she left and this ended up being the reference I used for the drawing. While the saturated colour of the headphones grabbed me, but they didn’t match the planned colourway for the drawing so I isolated them on photoshop and crudely changed their hue to yellow instead.

Image 1: Original photo reference / Image 2: Background removed, pink accessories isolated on photoshop & altered to yellow using hue slider tool / Image 3: Drawing made from photo reference. © Derwent 2019

Coloured filters – adding coloured filters to your photo reference can instil different moods in an image before you start to draw or paint from it – many devises have pre-set filters, while dedicated photo editing programmes will give you more control.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Katie / Images 2 & 3: Photos with different multiplied coloured layers added on photoshop

Cropping

Never underestimate the importance of cropping and aligning your reference material before you start to work from it. Think about whether you want straight edges in the image aligned horizontally, vertically or diagonally and use the cropping tools to edit the tilt of the image – crop the picture plane to the part of the image that you intend to work from to help you make decisions about the compositions before you start drawing or painting. If you are working from physical reference, use paper border to experiment with alternative cropping.

Image 1: Original Drawing Circus reference / Image 2: Adjusting tilt to align with background / Image 3: Cropping the image tighter to focus on two figures

Distorting digital photo reference

Painting from pixelated images has become a staple of contemporary painting, from watercolour paintings like this one by James Cowland to oil paintings like the one at the start of this post. By incorporating pixilation and digitally induced glitches into our tactile work we can explore and comment on our hybrid experience of the world as both physical and digital, or touch on social topics like the censorship of social media imagery.

Glitch Head Study by Milo Hartnoll

Pixilation – this presents an interesting colour mixing challenge, requiring the artist to mix colours specific to each isolated pixel. Milo Hartnoll has used variety of different techniques for inducing distortion in his work, including converting images to code, disrupting that code and returning them back to images to create unpredictable distortion which he them paints from. In the image below, Draw tutor & illustrator Laura Ryan used a photoshop filter to pixelate this photograph of Priss from the Draw reference photos

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Priss / Image 2: Image with Photoshop pixilation filter applied  / Image 3: Painting made from pixilated reference by Laura Ryan

Double takes – duplicated sections of imagery like the doubled features in Milo’s Glitch Head Study, or double image like the photo of Beth below can be a challenge to work from but can yield interesting and disconcerting results.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Beth / Image 2: Double image made by copying the image into a second

Distorting physical photo reference

Accounts of Francis Bacon’s famously chaotic studio describe photographs that had been melted and distorted with white spirit, recalling the distortions that we see in Bacon’s paintings. Distressing, melting, burning and folding can all create tactile interventions that are more unpredictable than digital edits and invite a real-world connection to the ephemeral images, embracing the photograph as a still life object as much as a record of its subject. A photograph distances you from the subject and rather than seeing this as a negative you can explore this distance as an aspect of you work. Experiment with that distance and how it can be pushed and pulled through further processes before it is rendered into a new form for painting or drawing.

Polaroids taken for drawing reference

Multiplying and copying - how does is change an image to create multiples and present them together? These polaroid’s have been photocopied and re-photocopied to create unpredictable, obscuring effects that will be replicated in a drawing from the imagery.

Degrees of distance - What happens to you imagery if you take it through several stages of separation before drawing from it? As an experiment I took a polaroid of a printed photo of Elle as reference to draw from.

Image 1: Original Draw Reference of Elle / Image 2: Polaroid of photo reference, used to draw from

Collage

Whether you use photoshop or good old paper and scissors, collage can be an excellent way of combining different elements and settings together as drawing reference. It is up to you how rational you want your subject to appear – if you aim is to create a convincing illusory scene then it is important to think about the light source affecting your subject and to maintain a rational perspective by scaling the figures appropriately in a space, but collage can also be a way to free yourself from the physical conventions. All of the image sources explored in last weeks post – magazine rips, found photographs, your own photo reference – can be combined with abstracts shapes and drawn elements to create a new scene or subject to draw or paint from.

Left Images: Original Draw reference of Felix & Bruno / Middle Image: Personal photograph from a day trip to Kew Gardens / Right hand image: Digital collage made on photoshop as drawing reference, imagining Bruno as a rising fish god. 

NB. While collage can be an outcome in itself the terms of use for most paid-for reference, like the Draw photo reference, prohibit the use of the actual photographs a collage presented as finished work.

Image 1: Original Draw reference of Ellie / Image 2: Collaging with found photo reference of plants / Image 3: Collaging ready to draw from

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<< Read the first post ‘Gathering Imagery’ here.

This article was written by Jake Spicer with additional input from Lancelot Richardson. All uncredited images by the author.