[a fool in paradise]

He may or may not have used enlarged transparencies (or those projectors that let you trace an image).

Photosourcing in American illustration art is common. Paperback covers, magazine covers, interior illustrations.

Depends on the budget of the work and how many volunteers an artist can find rather than hiring models.

Even Rene Magritte photosourced his paintings.

[Ditter]

I am an artist and I know a lot of artist use projected images to begin their work. I do not. It disturbs me when I see art students, who should be learning to draw, use a projector.

Then the non artist who looks at their work and marvels at their drawing ability, when in fact the non artists could do the same thing.

A number of years ago I signed up for a weekly water color class. I had never used watercolor and thought it would give me an insight into whether it was something I wanted to pursue.

The instructor said ‘all right class, let's begin”.

The whole class jumped up and went into a small room with their photos. That is where the projector was kept.

Needless to say, I did not go back.

[Flag_This]

David Hockney wrote an entire book about this subject. He had pretty compelling evidence that Vermeer and other artists used the camera obscura to project images on to their canvases. Thomas Eakins is alleged to have relied heavily on photographs for his works. It’s interesting how people act as if using this tool somehow invalidates what the artists accomplished. If you compare the photos with the paintings in posts 14 and 15 the paintings are not slavish copies of the photos and the paintings are far more compelling. You can’t simply project a photo onto a canvas and come up with something remotely comparable to Rockwell’s and others’ achievements.