In this class, the teacher would sit, right in front, under the model, looking up into the model's chin, every time. She never did a different view for the alla prima class. She also would sit and paint while we painted, toss out 30 second random quips for "tips" then pigeon.
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She would do these paintings where, the face is tilted up, with dramatic under views, but the *head* was facing you, so you didn't see under the chin, the forehead was elongated, and the ears were in front. That let her frontalize/centralize the features while tilting them back.pic.twitter.com/RX7Syi1e1L
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What was crazy is she was so good at the realism that I didn't notice she was doing this until I literally took photos of her paintings and drew lines on them like in this blog post. Your brain is so bad at seeing faces realistically that if they're just a little close they workpic.twitter.com/rvcITY4trF
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The blog post is right, given that the face is straight on (nose is pointed right at you) the ears should be directly at you. But you also should be able to see the side of the face if the eyes, mouth, and nose are dead center and pointed at you. The AI does a pigeon!pic.twitter.com/bwWROOUIRe
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Basically, what pigeon teacher figured out (accidentally and unknown to her) is that if you centralize one part of a portrait, and make that accurate, then you can warp a lot of the rest to make it more appealing. Centralize the features and you can bend the head.
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If you want to bend the features, but not tilt the head in an ugly way, then you can get away with it. As long as it's not crazy the brain will go "yup that looks good!" and move on with its life. In fact, this effect was so powerful that _pigeon teacher_ didn't even see it.
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That class was when I realized that most of painting is figuring out what you can get away with given the average person's brain is kind of crap at visual perception and memory. As long as you hit all the cliches and didn't go too crazy people were fooled.
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Finally I stopped bothering with her class for this reason, but also because I found out 90% of the paintings she sells were from photos while she was walking around blabbing about how photos were terrible. At that point I figured there wasn't much to learn from her.
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I'm just looking at the portrait I sat for when I was 4. I vaguely remember being up high, perhaps a chair on a table. Anyway, portrait angle is from slightly below.
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Haha that's a terrible angle for a portrait.
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