Monday, August 28, 2006

The past


Last week I rescued a number of photo albums from my mother's house in order to catalogue them and scan them and save them on cds to preserve them for the future. The coincidence was the next day I was contacted by a relative who had completed a huge amount of geneology research on the family. He sent me volumes of information and photos that I had not seen before. It makes very interesting reading and visuals.

There are a number of photos there which make good drawing fodder for me and I'll tackle them in turn. Initially I am working ona portrait of my mother when she was about 18. I'm using Derwent Drawing Pencils as they fit the sepia type image of the age and I love the feel of them for portraits. Unfortunately, they never scan well and it too dark to take a decent digital image so I'll do that in another update.

For now, this is the beginning of the portrait - circa 1942.

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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your portraits are wonderful! I really like seeing them in the Derwent drawing pencils...can't wait to see this one finished.

Debbie

Mary said...

Jeanette, a splendid idea to keep these photographs alive in your sketches.

Making A Mark said...

Jeannette - there's some good software out there if you want to convert information and photos into a digitised family tree. I investigated it once when we did a similar exercise.

I like your idea of now converting photos into drawings.

(PS I've finally worked out how to see your images - I have to click on the indiviudal post name in the right hand column)

Jeanette Jobson said...

Thank you Debbie, I'll work on it and see what happens.

Its interesting to translate an old photo into a drawing Mary.

Thanks Katherine, I'll have a look at that if I ever decide to formalize this. So much work has already been done, it doesn't seem useful for me to spend time on it right now. However, scanning in old photos, some of them a bit ratty and tiny, is useful and they increase in size of course on screen making the possibilities of drawing them so much better.

I've always just clicked on the image itself to be able to see them. I wonder why that didn't work for you?

Matthew Bamberg said...

Not trying to sell anything here, but I just started teaching a course in photo restoration online at http://www.betterphoto.com/photocourses/MAT03.asp