snapshots from my yuletart (non-)progress

[ratcreature]

One of the moments to wish for roommates: you find yourself tediously posing for some position, trying to catch yourself on autotimer with your crappy camera, and not just that, but actually half-naked because it turns out that if you photograph yourself wrapped in two layers, one of it a cozy, thick fleece, you can't easily deduce how the limb looks. I'd actually even take a tripod to put a camera on, because balancing said crappy camera on something a workable height facing in a direction where I can pose on doesn't really work all that well. Argh.

Comments

[sholio]

I use mirrors a lot -- getting into a pose and taking a picture of myself in the mirror, I mean. I still have to use one hand to hold the camera, and sometimes I have to stand on chairs and photograph myself in sections to get the part of the pose I need (I don't have a good full-body mirror; that would probably be a useful thing to acquire, come to think of it) but I've found it pretty useful.

[ratcreature]

I wanted to see the pose from behind, with both hands in front of the body to see how arms look from behind when the hands are in front in that position and how much of the hands would be visible from that angle and what hidden by the head and such.

[sholio]

... yeah, that's a bit more difficult.

I've sometimes thought about getting one of those wooden artists' dolls, the ones you can put into different poses. The problem is, they don't really look all that much like human beings, and my problems usually amount to fairly specific questions of how the arms twist in a certain pose, or how clothing drapes when the body is bent a certain way. And, yeah, it's really tough to do when you just have yourself as a model.

Would it work to turn your back to a mirror and shoot over your shoulder or around your body with the camera? I've done that, too -- or held it above my head, or taken pictures of my closed eyes, stuff like that, where the camera can capture things you can't see yourself.

[ratcreature]

I have such a doll, but for movement it really sucks, because it is much more stiff than even the most inflexible humans. What I find that useful for is sometimes perspective and foreshortening from angles you can't easily pose. Then the blocky thing comes in useful too. I sometimes wonder whether one of those multi-jointed action figure toys that you see advertised in comic books would be more useful for posing limbs with a doll. At least in the ads they seem quite versatile.

[ratcreature]

I have now tried the "back to the mirror with photograph" for a body part detail of that dratted pose, and that sort of worked, once I figured out to do it mirror-reverse, i.e. to get the reference for my right in the mirror to make it the left... Spatial imagination, why are you so hard?