The importance of using referance images

June 21, 2019

The importance of using referance images

Hello my darlings! Today I wanted to put out a short blog that is something I feel really strongly about.

I feel like one of the biggest misconceptions having to do with art is that there come some sort of wellspring of inspiration and inherit knowledge of how things should look. This is 99.9% of the time completely inaccurate.

The single most important tool in your artistic arsenal is reference.

Almost all artists (or at very least trained artists) use some for of artistic reference. This can come in many forms! For example if you're in school and you have a model sit for your class then that is your reference. If you set up a still life of a bowl of fruit, the bowl of fruit is your reference and so on. It used to be that in a traditional style arts school that you did endless master copies and drew from life until it was totally ingrained into you. So glad that I went to a Bauhaus style art school.

One of the best things about the current age is that the internet really gives us endless supply of any type of reference we want. I used to have a friend in school who looked at, uh, adult imagrey for referance. I guess it was a more exotic set of positions. Often I combine many different images into one to create the image in my mind. That's the goal you see.

I have an image in my mind that I want to translate into reality. (however odd it may be) I find some sort of reference images to have on hand while I go into a sketch phase, then I get my final sketch together. Typically this is where I transfer onto my final canvas or paper. All the way until the end I have my reference ear by.

A big part of my art these days ends up being photographic images I've personally taken. My phone is mostly filled with shots I've taken out and about of things that interest and inspire me. With the hopes of getting a few that will one day make it into a painting or drawing.

I wanted to give you an example of my own work where I used a model/photo reference for my own work.