– in that photo-realistic - almost woodcut - style that is often seen in the Wall Street Journal? I took a single drawing class in college, but it didn’t seem like their roughly sketched impressionistic system could lead to this mastering this style. Is there a method out there that aims to specifically teach this style? Thanks.
You might start here:
To me, that looks like a photograph with a stochastic filter applied. I seriously doubt that’s a drawing.
They are. The above guy’s link confirms it.
Well, on the other hand, before the advent of photoshop and digital signal processing, there was a long history of printmaking, where artists would try to mimic reality. Looking at a magnfication of the image, I can imagine that a very dedicated craftsman could reproduce an image of similar quality. Looking at that image closer, I thought that it might actually be a lithograph done by stippling. I’ve taken an art class in lithography, and there used to be an actual profession for stipplers, basically drawing dots and lines in order to mimic a grayscale photograph. From what I understand, the artist made the drawing and then a stippler would come in and stipple the appropriate gray scale (made up of the appropriate density of dots). All the lithographs I’ve seen did not approach the degree of photorealism in this image.
Of course, after the advent of photography, photorealistic painting became quite possible, and some artists are quite capable of making paintings indistinguishable from a photograph at a distance.
Here’s an example of a pretty damn good stippler.
There’s a printmaking technique called photogravure:http://www.photogravure.com/ that may have been employed but I agree, stippling seems more likely.
There’s a similar style that’s often done on scratchboard, that’s a bit more abstract. The only examples I can think of right now were the covers for Marvel’s 1602 series.
The secret is practice and a good mental image of what you want. (I could theoretically do it, but 1) I’d go insane first and 2) it’d look like ass comparatively)
Moving from IMHO to Cafe Society.
In the 1950s there were numerous artists who specialized in “photo-realistic” or imitation engraving art done in scratchboard and pen. The linked image of Frederick Douglas doesn’t use scratchboard, but the visual goal is the same.
At one point in my life I was fascinated by the technique and took a few shots at it, however I never achieved the mechanical-looking regularity of line that is a large part of the charm. (For example the rows of lines on Douglas’s jacket that are neatly parallel but also slightly wavy to indicate the contours of the cloth.) If I was to attempt it today, I’d make sure to have a set-up that allowed for quick rotation of the paper, so that I could use a downward “signpainter’s” stroke throughout the drawing. I might also draw evenly spaced light pencil lines to help keep the ink lines parallel. Learning how to “cheat” is important.
A drawing like the one of Douglas uses many different techniques: the hair is wavy lines, the skin is stipple, the jacket is like engraving, the chair is different than the jacket. There’s a lot of trial and error, and experience involved. The hair is one place where scratch board would be helpful – to get some white lines on top of the black lines. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some white paint used in the hair.
