How do you get from photo to canvas?

[Brenda Ellis]

I occassionally use the grid method and I find that I often, ironically, have to correct my grid drawing quite a bit by freehand. Go figure.

I have used tracings also for a quick placement of the features. I then still draw the features freehand. The exception is complicated fabric folds or patterns. I don't feel bad at all tracing this. (I get lost trying to grid fabric folds and everything is in the wrong square, so I trace this.) And even when I trace, I have to adjust the fabric folds because I'll end up with a weird little shape or the folds are too even or I have to simplify it anyway.

I am not good at gridding and tracing drives me crazy because something always moves and the tracing is off so I have to correct that. My eyes get tired using the brush or pencil to measure. (I wonder if this is because I wear contacts?) So because I am lazy, I try as much as possible to just draw what I see and measure in my mind. I do scan and enlarge the photo to get at least the head the same size as I want it on my canvas even if I am freehanding it. This makes it easier to just draw freehand without worrying about scaling. Often this means printing out the head by itself. Often this is the only thing I print out.

I'm not all that great at drawing a likeness freehand. I usually have to correct everything at least once, but I'm good at catching the errors if I step back and look a bit. It also has taught me to make the first lines very light, and this way, I still am free to use quality of line as expression later on in the drawing once I have things in the right place. I don't do very very detailed drawings for paintings, but I do draw outside of painting because drawing is my first language. Painting is still a foreign language to me.

I am lucky and go to a studio with a live model every Friday. I usually try to just "sight" it and only measure for the initial placement of the figure. Then when I come back after the break I can look and see where I went wrong and correct it. (More about this later). If I get completely lost I'll measure. I find that if I draw a line along the nose (between the eyes down to the middle of the lips), that keeps the angle of the head good.

I like the proportion calipers described above by some of you. This may be handy for me when drawing from life.

But the reason I'm posting this in the first place is my gripe. I love drawing or painting from life but the model never NEVER ever gets back in the exact same position after a break. It could drive me insane if I let it. I have tried getting the face down as quick as possible in the first 20 minutes so I don't have to worry about getting the model back in the exact same position. This is bad because there are details I need to reference later and of course they are all different because the head is an inch more angled or whatever. So I've tried waiting to do details in the face and then I have the same problem and it's worse because the model has shifted slightly at every break and so the neck is now wrong for the head and I still only have twenty minutes to get it right. I've tried taking a photo of the model home with me to correct features at my leisure but I look at the photo and it is not what I saw in person. due to camera distortion and limitations.

This is traveling from the original subject of the thread but ...

How do others deal with the slight shifting problem in models from life?? Or am I the only one bugged by this?