How to Draw from a Reference Photo: What to Copy and What to Change

Know what the camera gets wrong

Your eyes adapt constantly, so you can see detail in a bright sky and a dark doorway at the same time. A camera sensor records a narrower range of brightness. In a photo, shadows often become solid black and bright areas become plain white. If you copy those areas literally, the drawing loses form exactly where it needs it most: the shadow side of a face, the dark coat of a black dog.

Cameras also blur. A portrait photo with a sharp face and a soft background has shallow depth of field. That can look good in a drawing, but it is a choice, not a fact about the scene. And phones set colour automatically, so indoor photos often have an orange or blue cast that you would never notice in the room.

Make an edited working copy

Keep the original untouched and make a copy to study. Brightening the shadows on the copy shows what is hiding in them: the edge of a jaw, the stripes on a dark tabby. Lowering the highlights recovers shape in white fur or a bright cheek. Any phone photo editor can do this with the shadows and highlights sliders.

Make a second copy in black and white. Colour makes it hard to judge how light or dark something is; in greyscale you can see the value pattern directly. Some artists go further and reduce the image to three or four flat tones, which shows the big shapes of light and shadow that the drawing must get right before anything else.

Decide what to leave out

A photo includes everything in front of the lens. A drawing is better for leaving things out. Distracting background objects, a collar tag, a stray hair across an eye, a reflection in glasses: decide before you start what will not be in the drawing, so you do not spend time rendering something you later wish was not there.

Simplify texture too. In a photo, every hair, pore and leaf is equally sharp. In a strong drawing, detail is concentrated where you want the viewer to look, usually the eyes, and the rest is suggested with fewer marks.

Combining more than one photo

Sometimes the best expression is in one photo and the best light in another, or you have the face but not the ears. Combining references works if the light comes from the same direction in each. If one photo is lit from the left and the other from the right, the shadows will contradict each other and the drawing will look pasted together.

Match the viewing angle as well. An ear photographed from above will not fit a head photographed at eye level. When you must combine, draw the main photo’s structure first, then adapt the borrowed part to fit it rather than copying it exactly.

Work at a size where you can compare

Put the reference and your drawing side by side at roughly the same size, at the same distance from your eyes. Constantly moving your head between a small phone screen and a large sheet of paper makes accurate comparison very hard. A printed copy at the drawing size, or a tablet propped next to the paper, makes every measurement easier.

Step back every twenty minutes or so and look at both from a distance. Problems with overall proportion and value are much easier to see from across the room than from a few centimetres away.

Questions before you start