The fox to the Little Prince..."it is only with the heart one sees rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye."

I am an art teacher and have got myself in a difficult dilemma. I have allowed my students to use the projector to project their portraits onto canvas. They have produced amazing paintings and this is because I have taught them how to paint technically, the projector did not teach them to do that, the projector was just a tool to give them a quick start. My department however disagree and feel my students have "Cheated" which I feel is ludicrous!!! I now feel that I am in a difficult situation because I feel they are very old fashioned and stuck in their ways and I need advice on how to persuade them that the students have not cheated. The board AQA fully support me and say it is a tool to enlarge, any suggestions on how I can put my argument forward to my department? I will be very greatful. Mary

I used to make about six or seven thumbnails before painting the bigger canvas. Now I do it in half the time with the aid of Photoshop. Taking advantage of available technology is not cheating.. Stick by your guns

Having viewed the Gustav Klimt exhibition today at the Neue Gallery in Manhattan, all I can say is . . . awesome. Soft edges, yes, hard edges, yes, but his combination of edges, form, color, and pattern work so incredibly well together. I left there inspired to work as he did - with passion, and, clarity & mystery at the same time. A beautiful show in an elegant venue; get there if you can!

I am sure that the great artists of the past - Leonardo da Vinci especially - would have used any technology available. He would have used a digital camera had it been invented, he certainly would have used projection. Drawing up is the easy bit in painting - deciding where to place it, how to crop, composition, actually painting - all of these things are a minefield of decisions. If projecting gets us there faster, all the better. We use calculators to add and subtract in maths - no one expects us to do mental arithmetic any more, this is not considered cheating. A projector is a tool, so is a brush, do they also expect your students to paint with their fingers?

Didn't artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer use the "camera obscura" to create their compositions? If they used that, what's wrong with enlargements? Seems like your board has forgotten that school is a gamut of experiments - it isn't as if the students will paint that way forever.

This is from: Vermeer and the Camera Obscura by Philip Steadman:
For more than a hundred years, it has been suggested that the great 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer made use of the camera obscura as an aid to painting. The camera obscura was the predecessor of the photographic camera, but without the light-sensitive film or plate. It is well established that in the 18th century some other famous painters employed the device, the best-known being Canaletto, whose own camera obscura survives in the Correr Museum in Venice. The English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds owned a camera; and the device was widely used by landscape artists, both professional and amateur, up until the invention of chemical photography in the 1830s.

Fire those Old Dudes!

I have done it all as far as using a projector, grids, and digital to help with the proportions, however, since my training was with the Famous Artists Course in Illustration, I have found a great deal more satisfaction in free hand drawing. It is looser, softer and I know it is mine alone! Make a few drawings of the subject after studying the proportions, and you will be so proud of yourself and Artwork! No guilt feelings either. Hand and eye co-ordination and it just comes from you with a spirit that copying doesn't get.

Projecting is to a Graphic Artist as Freeform Drawing is to a Fine Artist. Which do you want to be?

I see the projector issue as something that should be dealt with in the course outline. If drawing, perspective, values, etc. are not part of the course and you are aiming to teach brush control and colour mixing, you are on firmer ground having your students use a projector.

For Mary: Did the students make a sketch from their portrait photographs first, or from the live subject? This will put the image into their minds and hands and help them with the painting. Having done that, I see no reason why not to project the photograph onto the canvas for a bare outline in order to have a correct starting point.

Mary, my favorite instructor from Mexico (very traditional) used to ask me: do you want to draw, or do you want to paint? There is no cheating, he said, when it comes to how to get your image on your canvas -- projection, tracing, etc. -- all should be allowed. Particularly in a classroom setting where time is of the essence. Otherwise students might spend all their time trying to get their drawings accurate and never get to the painting which sounds like the place you were trying to get them. Learning projection methods is also valuable. Not to say that drawing isn't an important skill for artists. It's just not always necessary for making a fine painting.

Some wood carvers insist on using only manual tools for all work. They say using a power tool is "cheating". However, others say the great carvers of the past who were very busy had apprentices who did the roughing out for them. This is a manual power tool, in a sense. Power tools help in the grunt work of stock removal for those of us with hands weakened by age. The finishing work I do is all done using hand tools. A local portrait artist uses copying in order to get the details just right. He says a millimeter difference in a line on the face can make the person look like someone else. His clients prefer their portraits to look exactly like them, rather than almost like them. So is it cheating? Or is it working smart?

"Projecting is to a Graphic Artist as Freeform Drawing is to a Fine Artist. Which do you want to be?" What a load of "Bull Hockey". The "Creativity Police" are back with what is "Artistically Correct". My God! She used the "P word". Please don't make such statements and hide behind "anonymous".

Mary, why not, just this once, let your students use the projector for a very very short limited time, just to get the summary of shapes and positions down. The eye/hand skill is so precious--don't let anything diminish the encouragement of it.

I am afraid I am going to step on some toes here. I think the use of projectors is limiting a person from mastering drawing technique. Part of being an artist is drawing, and honing that skill is what separates the good from the great. I am especially sensitive to this issue when it comes to portraiture. I wonder how many artists who do portraits actually tell their clients they are going to project a photo image onto a canvas before painting. If they are not, there is a reason, they don't want the client knowing. If you are being upfront with the client, then wonderful. Maybe the client doesn't care, they just want a good portrait, but I would wager all who use projectors truly inside wish it were not necessary for them to do so.

Mary, did your students trace the projected image? If so, they are copying, not creating, and I would agree with Tina -- as well, they are being deprived of the joy of drawing. If you want to paint a photographically realistic portrait, fine, but if you want to paint an original, avoid projectors.

Mary, I'm not going to jump into the right or wrong debate. I like the idea of finding articles that showed the use of "camera obscura," but that may not resolve your situation. May I offer a suggestion? Perhaps you could have your students use the projected-image painting as the first in a series, and then have them create a series of additional pieces in which they use ONLY the painting they created as source material, no photographs or anything else. Perhaps it could be a series of 10 smaller paintings, in the same or different medium, in which they use the first painting as the reference for the first two paintings, then generate a new painting solely from the last one painted. You may also set a time limit on the smaller series paintings; here I'm thinking of Robert's recent post on painting fast. By the way, I got this idea from Kevin Macpherson's recent book, "Landscape Painting, Inside and Out." He suggests painting from photographs in this manner to get artists away from "copying" and into translating their own images and impressions from the reference material. Perhaps you can blend both sides of the debate and make the students the winners? Best of luck to you.

One thing that nobody mentioned yet is that camera introduces distortions, and even more for the people who are not pro photographers. If the artist using reference photos doesn't know or notice the distortions, they end up on the painting. The masters who used camera obscura were proficient with the rules of perspective and knew how to make corrections where needed. The distortions can be especially visible in portraits done by straight tracing of photos. They do look exactly like the person on the photo, but the small distortions, excessive details or lack of form where it is essential do the damage. Artists can overcome this relying on their experience, but I doubt that students can.

I'm not against projectors, but I can't use them myself....I find if I don't paint plein air, my paintings turn out very flat.Art is about expression. If an artist is willing to put themselves out there and try and sell a piece of art (which has such a strong connection to their soul) then who cares how they made the art. Everybody needs a little help expressing themselves sometimes.

I agree that the human face is so difficult to capture, even a millimeter difference in the placement of an eye, a nose, the corner of the mouth, can mean the difference between a likeness and a "near miss". I had my own portrait sketched by a street artist in Moscow once. He struggled for an hour, til the sun went down! Then he tossed off a five-minute portrait of my husband. We went home with a double portrait, of my husband with Another Woman!!! If someone wants to pay you to paint their portrait, do whatever it takes to get that likeness.

I wonder if Michelangelo worried that he had to use live models, draw them out, then copy them to full size on a large piece of paper, then run a perforating wheel around the significant lines, tape the paper to the surface he was working on, pounce the perforated holes with powdered chalk or charcoal, then remove the paper and retrace the lines with his brush. He might have thought a truly great artist could just climb up on the scaffold and paint. I wonder if he was embarrassed about using assistants to do some of this?

MARY! Read your comment on using a projector in an art class. Tell your colleagues that they do not know much about art practice or art history. The camera obscura was widely used, historically. Almost certainly by Vermeer (a lens grinder by trade) Likely by Carravaggio. Michelangelo transferred his Sistine Chapel drawings to the ceiling. The photo realists projected. Andy Warhol, Rauchenberg, etc, used direct photo processes. I, too, teach art. I teach many transfer techniques, tracing, projection, carbon paper transfers, the xerox machine. I have found that tracing improves drawing skills. You can offer your colleagues a conundrum. Have your students make a 3x5 inch drawing. Enlarge it on a machine. Have the students transfer the drawing in a larger size. Is that "cheating"? I, too, have caught flak regarding this issue. The arguments are always bogus, and have something to do with suffering artists. I want my kids to understand that technology bows at the feet of the creative people, for creative people create metaphors. My kids make collages with magazine images. They are challenged to make combinations of people, animals and plants with machines, and buildings. The collage is traced, transferred and made into a painting. Hey, kid! You are a Surrealist. Introduction to Surrealism. You are just using the tools of the trade. This is not just a quick way to make an image, it is a quick way to teach drawing, and metaphor. Hey, ask your colleagues if they still use a computer or a quill pen?

I think using a projector is fine, if the lesson is to learn how to mix colours and handle paint. However, I do very much believe, that developing one's hand-eye coordination and "seeing" skills is more important, in the development of an artist. Painting IS drawing, and if one cannot create an image without the aid of a projector, then they have not learned how to see. It is possible to develop one's seeing ability so well, that they can even do portraits, and "see" that millimeter difference in the placement of an eye or other feature, and then make the correction. I would worry about young artists especially, who are still developing their sighting abilities, in relying on a projector such that it becomes a crutch. I agree that photos distort, and painting from life is the best situation, when possible. I would tell your department that using the projector in this instance was for an exercise in colour and handling paint, and that students will also do exercises in drawing and seeing.