Scottish singer Susan Boyle in November 2009

Susan Boyle singing at the Edinburgh Festival Theater in Edinburgh, Scotland, July 12, 2013

Susan Boyle in pastels - Because of ongoing discussions about the first portrait of SB I have devised the following technique: I watched a video of Susan Boyle's second appearance a couple of times and at first chose an appealing head posture and put the form on paper. Imagine the image surface first featuring a flesh-colored oval surface tilted to the left, a hinted area of hair, and shoulder lines. I then left the video and first sketched the approximate locations of nose, eyes and mouth, and chose a gentle smile to make her look personable. Then I used Google's image search and studied elements of her face and their form on a several individual images each - eye, nose, etc. Thereby I gathered only the probable location - probably because I had to affix the elements on a dummy head with a certain predetermined inclination and direction. In the next step I decided that the head was lighted by a diffuse light from the front and a stronger light from the rear left and right and accordingly drew the three-dimensional shape of the facial elements. Then I considered cosmetics, trimmed her eyebrows to current dimensions, gave her a hairstyle she doesn't have but could have, decided for a monochrome background in "Veronesegrün" (a shade of green), and implied her being put in a kind of jacket over a shirt. Finally I applied some "make-up" here and there - at that point I had long ceased to look at photos. It was quite similar with Daniel Schuhmacher: a composition of many templates and my imagination. I "invented" this technique here, the discussion over the first image of Susan Boyle had given me sufficient awareness for copyright issues. This is not as incredible as it may appear at first glance, because if one makes portraits often one learns how to quickly capture key elements that make a face recognizable and how to implement those. One could say that it's all a matter of practice. I am sure these two images are unique and that they are not derivative work as defined in copyright law - and that both of them are sufficiently discernible and not derogatory. To those who want to try something like this: it requires a lot of material, the more the better! With Boyle and Schuhmacher this was of course easy, the web is full of templates. Without these it is hard to make sure that one doesn't simply copy a picture. - Chrisurlaub in May 2009, translation by Hekerui