Referencing in Art: What's the Secret?

Pose reference sites:

• https://posemy.art/
• https://figurosity.com/

Everyone’s telling you that to properly learn to draw you need to use references. But how do you actually do it? You’re supposed to look at a picture, and use it but… not copy it? What does that even mean?

Quite a while ago, I made a video on using references, and how it’s not cheating to do so, it’s in fact essential to making art. Go check that out if you want. In short, references are how you train your brain into drawing things correctly. A classic example of this: try to go draw an elephant from memory. Unless you do this often, you probably will make something that doesn’t look right at all. But if you have a few pictures of elephants nearby, you can probably do a lot better job, right?

That’s referencing at its core. You’re trying to draw something that you want to draw, but need to remind yourself of what it looks like so that you get proportions and features down right. And you get better and better at referencing as your art skill improves, being able to more quickly use a reference without consciously paying attention to exact proportions or perspectives. I’ve also spoken about this in my video about tracing. There’s a general spectrum of how you make art, from tracing all the way to imagination. But there’s this sweet spot where referencing is crazy useful for actually making your own original art. But you have to find the balance that ensures that you’re not drawing entirely from imagination, and also you’re not just directly copying what you see. Copying what you see is called a study, which I’ve also spoken about in that video. Studies are useful to warm up, so feel free to start with that, but once you get to making your own original art, you’re going to want to switch to referencing.

By far the easiest way to not accidentally copy too much of a reference is to use multiple. Drawing a cat? Grab a bunch of cat pictures of different cats, angles, and locations. Get an idea for some proportions from a picture that works best. Then look around your references and find some that help you fill out details. The more you get into a habit of doing this, the easier it gets. As a bonus, you’ll learn faster drawing with multiple references because you’re taking in a lot more information up front and filling out your visual library in your head.

So what are some good resources? My favorites:

• Image search. Google, Bing, Unsplash, whatever. Typically you want photographs! Look for what you need and grab a bunch.
• Pose websites and apps. There are a bunch of these out there, and I’ll link a few in the resources and description below. These can be used to search for or set up your own character poses in the exact way that you want them.
• Physical pose dolls… sometimes. A lot of those wooden pose dolls out there aren’t super flexible, whether it’s a hand or body, and can’t really bend in the ways that you’d need them to. If you have access to some more detailed pose dolls, they can help a lot, otherwise I’d not worry about these.
• Lastly: take a picture of yourself! Quite often we’re drawing characters in our art, and it’s hard to figure out what a certain pose would look like. Prop your phone up against something, set a photo timer, and do the pose yourself! Take a few pictures spinning yourself around a bit to get multiple angles. This actually works incredibly well.

Even if you’re drawing an imaginary creature, it’s going to be based on something from reality, and you should think about what those pieces are to find the right references. Take a dragon, for example. You might find pictures of various kinds of lizards to reference to draw the head. Maybe bat wings. And depending on the body, you might reference a quadruped like a wolf, or the classic human figure. We make art that we like. The things that we like are things our brains find familiar yet exciting. So… find what portions of your creature are grounded in reality and take advantage of those. Go grab some references today! You can do it! I’ll see ya next time.