Why do a lot of artists paint portraits upside down?
In: Other
It is an effort to stop you painting based on your preconceptions, rather than what you see.
When you ask a child to draw a face, you get a somewhat cartoonist, overdrawn picture – the mouth is a pair of giant red lips, the eyes are giant round balls and the nose is an arrow shape.
In reality this is obviously not the case, the features become less defined and prominent, and the shapes are much less obvious and blend in more.
As adults, we often still do this, and end up drawing what we think something should look like, not what it actually does.
By drawing upside down you lose the ability to draw from memory, as all the shapes and features become unnatural. This forces you to draw exactly what you see, and you tend towards a more faithful drawing as you don’t see a pair of lips as being lip shaped (and then start unconsciously altering them), you just see them as an abstract shape that is easier to copy.
The same works for things like signatures – trying to copy a signature normally, you will find your handwriting style and preconceived notions of the letter shapes will start influencing the copy. Copied upside down you are instead copying the shape and line of the signature, and paying no attention to what each letter represents.
Latest Answers