Portrait Pencil Drawings with Love

Jan 19 2010

SimmTrace – a brilliant idea for starting a drawing

When starting a drawing, the first issue is: how am I going to trace my drawing correctly, easy and fast? Everybody has different methods for doing this: transfer paper, grid from photo/print reference, lightbox, real life trace, Photoshop grid, and so on.
Even in the ancient times, artists had their own methods. Artists such as Van Gogh and Da Vinci used the grid, but we attribute the grid to Albrecht Dürer. His magnificent drawings show such realism and the grid was part of that success.(ref)

Did you know the old masters often traced? Leonardo Da Vinci used “Camera Obscura” which is a lens and a mirror set at an angle with parchment over it to trace onto. Michaelangelo used a similar technique. The use of Photography as a mechanical aid to oil paintings and other forms of realistic art came right away. This is not surprising since artists had been tracing from Camera Obscura for thousands of years. (ref)

I just discovered SimmTrace – an optical device which allow anybody to draw like an expert. It is a great idea for starting a draw, which belongs to Roy Simmons. He is a great artist from United Kingdom specialised in watercolour. Bellow you can see Roy’s presentation for the SimmTrace:

Easy, isn’t it? Now I can save a lot of time by tracing my drawings. Before I used transfer paper and it took me a lot of time. Here is a demonstration and some tips of how I used Roy’s idea and of course his software:

Share and Enjoy:

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8 responses so far

8 Responses to “SimmTrace – a brilliant idea for starting a drawing”

1. # Alinaon 19 Jan 2010 at 11:01 pm

   Cool, very useful. Thk Jullia, great work

2. # Roy Simmonson 20 Jan 2010 at 11:51 pm

   Glad you are finding it useful! Have you tried the newer version of the software? Not much difference exept it uses hotkeys to change transparency, and of any window. So you can make the photograph transparent and use any webcam preview software. It doesn’t have the slider option though, which you may see as a dis-advantage.

   I really like what you are doing, your work continues to amaze me, and to be a small part of that gives me great pleasure.

   Roy.

3. # TheDrEggon 21 Jan 2010 at 10:40 am

   He is a pretty clever chap, that Roy Simmons and I agree, those landscapes of his are very good.

4. # julliaon 21 Jan 2010 at 2:18 pm

   Hi Roy! indeed it’s a great idea and I find it useful I tried the second version of SimmTrace too. It’s also great, but I don’t know why I got attached by the first one, and the Microsoft LifeCam software does not allow the full screen mode.

   Thanks for your appreciation, it means a lot to me

5. # Dianneon 05 Feb 2010 at 6:36 pm

   How about learning some anatomy and then draw everything without any programs or transfer paper or whatever?

6. # julliaon 05 Feb 2010 at 6:49 pm

   That’s a good idea too, Dianne. But for example I haven’t made anatomy lessons, only what I learned by my own, and many other people who want to make realistic portraits. And it is harder for me to do that. And usually clients want to see themself exactly like in the photo. So, I found this program to match exactly with this issue.

7. # Royon 04 Mar 2010 at 4:07 pm

   Hi Julia, I have placed this page on my new ning site, under ‘Roys Other Art stuff’ its good to have someone else’s perspective (http://paintmyphoto.ning.com/)

   Roy.

8. # julliaon 04 Mar 2010 at 6:39 pm

   great! I’ve just joined there too (; I’m looking for inspiration now, ‘cose I bought some brushes yesterday and acrylics

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