Background: What are References?

When an illustrator starts a project, we need to find references.

References are pictures or drawings that help assist the creation process. You can’t draw what you don’t know:

• If I don’t know what a pirate is, I need to reference a photo of what that looks like.
• I need to know what colors an object is with a specific type of lighting.
• I can’t figure out how a hand looks at a certain angle.

Reference for a character:

Of course you can memorize everything, which the greats do, but I’m not one of them.

So how does one currently (1) find (2) use, and (3) reuse reference images for your projects.

1. Finding Images

Pinterest is the go-to (or just Googling for images)

It lacks in a few areas:

• Ads are very annoying
• There’s 0 built-in artist attribution