Audrey Hepburn of course...by ~dtw42

Traditional Art / Drawings / Portraits & Figures

Okay, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking (a) that's not his usual style of stuff, (b) hm, quite good, actually looks like her, and (c) really familiar – isn't this copied from a famous photo?

YES, it is, and that's kinda the point.

I've seen a lot of celebrity portraits here on dA: pencil drawings, digital paintings, whatever. Far too many of them are David Tennant and Emma Watson, it seems. And lots of them are very familiar looking, because they are copied from photos.

I have no problem with that. That's fine.

But what I do think, is that the artists should ADMIT IT UP FRONT. Some of them do. Well done. Some say "reference used". Hm, well I would say "reference used" if I was drawing someone else and got stuck with a particular pose or folds of drapery or something and borrowed that bit from a photo.

If what you've done is sat down with a picture of Marilyn Monroe and made a charcoal representation of THAT picture, it's only polite to say so. People may still say "wow that's so cool did you actually draw that yourself?" and you can still say "yes" but they won't be attributing a representational talent to you that you may not actually possess.

On the other hand, if you can make a portrait of a famous person actually look like that person WITHOUT working from a photo, that's UTTERLY AMAZING and you should be praised to the skies!

AFTER doing this drawing, I dragged-and-dropped it into Google image search to see what it would match it with, and at THAT point I discovered that at least two other people here on dA have already done versions of this picture.

The original photo comes from the Ronald Grant Archive, and the version I worked from was printed in "Winners", a supplement supplied with the April 1994 issue of Empire magazine. If you just type "Audrey Hepburn portrait" into Google, the original photo for this image will almost certainly be in the top ten results you'll find.

Oh, by the way, media: Staedtler Mars Lumograph EB pencil, Pentel 0.5mm B leads in mechanical pencil, Staedtler Mars-Plastic eraser, old cartridge paper.

Three stages of work in progress for this are in my scraps [here], [here], and [here].