Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A Fun Art Idea


Here's a neat twist on a concept that's been floating around the Web a while: "Camera and Pencil," in which artist Ben Heine appears to be holding a scrap of paper with a pencil drawing that perfectly merges with the real background, usually with some added bits of whimsy or fantasy. I like it! (Follow that link above to see more.)
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I write "appears" because it's not clear to me how Heine does it. You're supposed to think that he sketched it on-site with incredible skill and held it to align perfectly for the camera. I dunno; maybe he did! But a much simpler method occurs to me: take a photo of your hand holding a blank piece of paper, then go home, do the sketch in perfect alignment and perspective, and paste it into the blank space with Photoshop. Or I suppose the entire thing could be assembled in Photoshop--the background elements, the paper, the drawing, the hand--but that would circle back around to being unnecessarily difficult.

To be clear, I'm not accusing Heine of "cheating." I don't really care how he does it--I think it's nifty and you can't spell "art" without "artifice" (wait, I have that backwards...). I just can't help speculating through the filters of "I wonder how he did that" and "If I were going to do that...." In any case, check out and enjoy the fun drawings.
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3 comments:

L said...

I've actually seen this guy before on DeviantArt, he's been posting on there for a while! I always like his drawings/pictures when they pop up - however he does it, they're definitely clever.

Sherwood Harrington said...

If he doesn't do it the way you suggest, his forehead is going to bear the mark of his palm smacking into it for a long time once he hears about it.

Speaking of art-magic, you've probably seen this before (it's got almost 2 million views on YouTube), but just in case you haven't it's worth a look.

Brian Fies said...

L, I didn't know that! But then, I'm the last to find out about a lot of things. Why, just a couple of days ago I found out that everyone in my family is smarter than I am...

(Private joke, sorry.)

Sherwood, I have not seen that guy, nor some of his techniques. Really interesting! He didn't go where I thought he was going to, which is back-painting on glass (spray paint the back and then turn it over when done). That can also give you some very nice planetary and nebulae effects--in fact, my girls (ahem, "L") and I did some for fun a few years ago with mixed results. We should have lit something on fire.