It took me a long time, but I eventually realized that to make any painting with a person in it, I’d have to get a photograph of the pose to get it “right” (although apparently I still can’t even get it totally right this way either).  I’d always marvelled at other artists that could apparently pull complex scenes with body, light and shadow out of thin air.  Well, it turns out that, more and more, these aren’t out of thin air at all – and most of these guys have to do just as much prepping and use actual models as well.

Take a look at this interesting article about Norman Rockwell.  All those fantastic scenes with the overly expressive faces and bodies were all rehearsed and photographed in a studio first.  Makes a little more sense now. 

I used to sit around and sketch and not be able to figure out why a pose wasn’t working.  I’d get all frustrated and berate myself for not being a “real artist” like my art world idols who (I thought) could just make a few quick strokes and get the figure perfectly, not to mention the complex lighting on their paintings.  Not so.  I would always wonder how Norman Rockwell always got the clothing so realistic looking.  Every little scrunch in the armpit looked like a shirt would really work.  Well, it’s because that is how it looked when he photographed it!

Even his famous moon landing painting (seen in the article) was faked and photographed with NASA’s help! 

Many of these techniques, including gridding a canvas or projecting the image, I used to consider “cheating” and my work suffered accordingly.  Only recently did I figure out that the final image is what is important – not what you did to get there.