Family composite portrait
 

Hopefully this will work. This is a portrait of a family of six which I drew from six seperate photographs. I found it to be quite a challenge to take the images and produce one cohesive drawing. I would appreciate your comments.
Thank you.

Nice family portrait!

A good way to make things cohesive in any drawing or painting would be to "lose and find" some edges. This will tie in your background, your foreground and your figures with one another.

EXAMPLE: Ingres is a master who loses and finds edges with ease. His drawings even remind me a little bit of yours (in a linear kind of way).

Good job, Robert! This is tough especially when you have photos with light coming from different directions. You handled it well by minimizing the shadow. When you only have shots of the head, there is not much you can do as far as composition, other than what you have done. I had a similar project today, but the customer wanted a Morman temple in the background, which really cluttered my black and white charcoal. I could not convince her to leave it out. Sometimes a portrait is as much a work of the customer's as it is of yours.

Karin, can you define a little more about losing and finding edges? Do you mean the edge of the drawing paper, ot the edge of a line? In the first example, he does not find the edge of the paper at all, but does in the second. I admire your fine resources of subjects. What a terrific and generous critiquer you are!

I don't mean the edge of the paper.

For example, in the line drawing above of the two girls, the actual "line" drawn between them "disappears" in places - THE EYE CAN'T SEE THEM BUT THE BRAIN FILLS THEM IN. Other little places in this drawing are similar but may be hard to see in this post. The "found" edges here are in sharp contrast the background.

The 1726 Enoch Seeman portrait of Isaac Newton below may be a clearer example because it is so very easy to see:

The back of his coat is "lost" into the background. The edge of the face on the right is "lost" into the hair. Part of the light of the face is on the left is "lost" into the hair on the left. Many other little edges (too numerous to mention) get "lost" in this drawing.

A couple of examples of the "found" edges here are: The dark front edge of his coat and the lower part of his hair on the right is "found" next to the background, i.e., are in sharper contrast and thereby separated.

"Lost and found edges" are a wonderful way to unify a drawing or painting.

Here's a thread on edges: http://forum.portraitartist.com/show...=&threadid=302