Comment by Throwaway981920 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Throwaway981920 | Hacker News Reader

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Throwaway981920

Agreed. When it comes to hyper-realism, they draw a grid over the source material, and the canvas. It's not tracing, but it's a way of scaling and recreating the proportions of an image very accurately. You can see the grids in the below photos from him, and some others at the same studio.

https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/500067e25f25f208...

https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/f5a832fa32f0fef2...

https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/30551f3410feac03...

https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/ee5c9ffc77f60e92...

Now, look at the work from this 11 year old when he draws a live person.

https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/15e2a787bc8a92a6...

Don't get me wrong, he's talented, and it's clear he has spent a lot of time practicing. The below video shows him sketching a life drawing of a woman, and I think it's better than most could achieve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQeNBCJt8-Y

When I was a kid, I tried to do similar things. I remember recreating photographs with pencil. I did a lot of measurements. For example, my drawing would be 10:1 scale compared to the source. So I'd measure the distance between the pupils, and mark them on the paper. Then I'd measure the source material for the distance from the left and right pupils to the right corner of the mouth, scale the measurements accordingly, and mark a dot for that position. In the end, I would get something similar to his below drawing, where it looked pretty realistic, but a little wonky.

https://scontent-frt3-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/e9bea443e7e0fe8b...

I was probably 13 at the time. Now, I'm a terrible artist. I probably spent hundreds of hours in life drawing classes in my late teens, and I was one of the worst people in my classes. If you give me a pencil and ask me to draw a person from my mind, or a person in front of me, I think I would do as good as the average person or worse. But, if you give me a photograph and time, I can do an accurate job at recreating it. I don't think it's much talent though, in my case it's more patience, and paying attention to small details.

In short, I think he's skilled at copying photographs, and shows a lot of technical promise at his age. That doesn't make him a genius artist though. Who knows though, maybe he'll get to that point.

See my comment above [1]. He could just use other creative photos (that he could also create himself), copy them using his technique and you would consider him a genius (i.e. he can create a Picasso-like image with his own style and simply copies the photo he creates). But I think even then you may not consider it genius because genius in the area of arts is highly subjective and you may not want to give him this status. Because it's so highly subjective, what you consider genius says more about you than about him.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549741

The genius in Picasso wasn't being able to technically draw Picasso-like scenes (anybody can, and besides Picasso could draw perfectly realistically as well whenever he wanted).

His genius was coming up with them -- the composition, the choice of colors, the tone, the framing, what he wanted to evoke etc.

The mere technical part of those drawings he could just assign to any first year arts degree student (and tons of auto-didact) to get right as well.

Someone using Picasso-like source material to create Picasso-like images technically would be nothing impressive.

In fact tons of street artists do just that -- copy paintings by Picasso or other masters, or draw something in their style, and nobody is much impressed. They sell their canvases on the street (e.g. in Monmarte) for like $20 or so.

> He could just use other creative photos (that he could also create himself), copy them using his technique and you would consider him a genius (i.e. he can create a Picasso-like image with his own style and simply copies the photo he creates).

Yes, if he "just" creates Picasso-like work in his own style, and copies it using pencil, I might consider him a genius. But... so far we have only seen he can copy a photograph to pencil, and countless people have that ability. It's the simple step of creating Picasso-like work that we haven't seen from him, and I feel it's a bit more tricky to master.

If he could create those other creative photos, then yes, I'd say he is a genius. The process of creating these creative photos would be remarkable, not the copying to a canvas or a bigger paper.

As it is, there's nothing notable in copying pictures with a simple method than anyone can follow very easily.

Thanks for finding those pictures! Hopefully it's now easier to see for those who don't care too much about art why hyper-realism is so much easier to achieve than, for example, any of the portraits here: http://plbrown.blogspot.com/2017/01/yes-its-real-thing-museu...

That sketch of a live girl shows his real skills and I found it to be much more interesting than his photocopying, even if it looks like a real 11-year-old's drawing. Thanks!

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