Art for Humans – Finding Reference

Art for Humans – Finding Reference – by Alexander Cardinal.

Find reference and find it everywhere! You need reference images if you want to make an image worth looking at. Obvious hyperbole aside, it’s true the vast majority of the time you need something to reference to make what you’re trying to draw or paint look correct. I’ve met and heard of some artists who feel that they don’t need any reference images and you know what maybe they don’t. Maybe they are simply gifted with artistic skills beyond my comprehension but I’m begging you from one artist to another do not try and use these artists as examples especially if you’re a beginner artist. Your work will always look better when you have something to base it off of, whether that’s a pose, a backdrop, an item, or especially an angel. Sure you can try to muster something from sheer memory but you’ll be better off trying to draw that complex anatomy of a person swinging an ax from a top-down angle with images of people swinging axes and images of people with cameras pointed down on them than you are trying to do all that without.

But where to find reference images? Find them everywhere and I mean that as literally as possible. Buy art books, look for images on Google, look for examples in real life, take your own reference photos, buy poseable art dolls, and take reference from OTHER ARTIST’s work. As long as you don’t directly trace someone else’s work it is fine, trust me artists would be flattered to learn you thought their poses and perspective were done well enough to use a reference for your work. Don’t choose one of these things I’ve listed you should do them all, I know I do! I have a literal hoard of images from other artists for all things, nature, anatomy, lighting, posing, and anything else in between. On top of that I do take my own references and own art books and poseable dolls, I use all of them all the time. More often than not I use more than one source of references for a single work of art.

There’s often a weird resistance to using reference but the only crowd it often comes from in the art world is new artists. There’s an air of insecurity about it from them, they’re often so worried about being a real artist and proving themselves that they end up thinking reference is some kinda cheating akin to theft or just plain laziness when it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Any artist worth their salt uses reference especially those in something like the comic industry, an artistic job with such stringent deadlines requires all the help it can get. The entire Still Life genre of art is entirely based on reference. That’s the whole point of that type of art and I don’t think anyone would call that lazy, trust me I had to make two black and white still lifes in college it’s anything but lazy.

At the end of the day, you’re going to draw a tree. Maybe just maybe, you should look at a tree while you do it.

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