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Tom of Finland’s technique:
I wanted to make them as natural as possible. Sometimes there was a nose or waist or something that had to be corrected a little. I added elements of existing photos and transferred them onto paper. This automatically gave me a photorealistic approach. It had a special effect, on me, at least. Suddenly I was doing figures that were almost alive. Not just outlined caricatures. This is a typical example of finding a certain detail. Taking it from a photograph. This was done to order. First there was this posture. Then I elaborated it by drawing with exaggeration. Here we have the same technique. A living model is transferred to a drawing. This is a long mural on canvas. The customer wanted a racing scene. I took this photo - which I had got a couple of years earlier. I used it as a model for one motorcyclist. So, I either used an existing photo or took a photo of a given motif.
Nowadays I use living models as much as possible. I like to choose them myself. I take a photo of the model and draw from that. When I do this, I have a visual image of a living person. Features and so on that I see in the photograph. Normally I use pencil. One picture takes about a week. There are something over 3,000 of them. Probably quite a lot more, because that estimate was made almost 10 years ago. Of course, I’m not as productive as I used to be, but I must have done a few hundred since then.
Daddy and the Muscle Academy (1991) dir. Ilppo Pohjola
1999 Bruce Weber Peter Johnson With Tom Of Finland Drawing Art Photo.
