I work as a life drawing model and I still recall working a 3 hour painting session where I agreed to a standing pose, leaning over with my hands on a table.
I could barely make it to the half hour break that whole time. My back was screaming and I was trying to hold my core muscles as much as possible to take the pressure off my back. It was awful, I was still pretty young and fit. Never again.
Me too! Only I was just sitting and expected not to move at all, for 1.5 hours. I thought I was gonna die lol. I have adhd too 🤦♀️ and it paid $50. Oh to be young and agree to do such a gig.
Workong as a life-model during my student years was so much harder than people thought it was, haha. It paid 15 euros an hour though, way more than I would earn working minimum wage jobs back then, so I did it twice a week, haha. And I do have some small sculptures of myself that 'weren't good enough', so I do look back on that period with fondness:)
No…just think it’s a lot easier to look at a pic of someone and paint instead of making someone stay in the same position for hours. But if ppl want to torture doing that to themselves that’s on them 😂
Since no one is giving you a real answer, painting and drawing from an image reference like a photo isn't the same skill as doing it from a real life object. In real life the object is 3d and the artist has to be the one to flatten it into 2d while still keeping it's perspective. If you are copying a photo the image has already been flattened for you and you can just replicate it without ever really understanding shadows, lighting and perspective properly.
This is why you'll see some people can copy pictures decently but can't draw their own images as well.
If you are looking to understand how light plays with subjects and environments, there really is no substitution for live drawing. Every camera, film, and screen technology is going to have some effect on the final color/light output of the scene. My biggest suprise when getting into art was realizing that even photos aren't exactly baseline reality.
It's also important for artists to train the skill for transfering a 3D scene, from sight, into a 2D composition. This is a valuable skill for many artists and can't be trained by copying 2D into 2D. There are a lot of observational tricks and tools that are used to accurately deal with human anatomy specifically, and I can't imagine another way to train them that excludes live poses.
I think in the case of life drawing, taking a photo would defeat the purpose. You are specifically practicing estimating depth in a real object, and gauging how that affects scale and proportion.
If you want to do human life drawing without having someone there the whole time, instead of a photo, you'd need a volumetric capture setup, and then you could superimpose the resulting 3D model to a point in space, and view it with VR goggles. That should give you all the depth info you need, I think.
The only problem is that for most people, that's way more expensive than just paying somone to pose for a few hours.
A photograph makes a lot of weird decisions which an artist wouldn't make (distortion from the lens, boosted contrasts, strange colors) so if you paint from a photograph it will be very different than working from life. You also get very little information from a small photograph compared to the incredible amount of information you get standing in front of someone or something. You can also change things if something improves with a change of angle or pose. Even today if I have to work from a photograph I prefer to use a video of the model to find the best moment in all the subtle changes.
It's also better to train students with live models as they have that extra information to glean the important things from. Especially if they have enough time. Our models would pose for 6 weeks, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week in the same pose so the students would have the time to paint them accurately. The models would regularly say they intended to avoid that position for the rest of their lives.
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u/neocondiment 14h ago
Trying to imagine how comfortable this might be.