Creator's Tips - Making the best of references

People often ask me about how I organise my reference materials. I usually say, the same as anything else.

If you are not using reference in your work, you are doing yourself an injustice. It is not cheating to use someone else's work or anything around you to take inspiration from. In fact, every professional worth his or hers salt will use reference.

 

What is reference?

Anything and everything so long as it matters to you.
Movies, books, artwork, tutorials, your view out your bedroom window - all of this goes into what we call your 'mental library'. I have mentioned this mystical place before in previous tutorials, but for those who don't know - a mental library sits somewhere between your imagination and your subconscious.
Every time you see or do something you are adding another book to this library. That is why the more you do something, the better you get at it. You are constantly learning - no matter the subject matter. The trick here is to learn the useful things that will make you a better artist (or better anything - because as someone correctly pointed out this works for lots of stuff!).

 

Good places to get reference from.

Your millage might vary - but here's a few tips and places that work for me.

 

Pininterest-

If I'm not nagging people to make use of this site, I'm not doing my job as an artist.

Pininterest is a FANTASTIC source of information, one I only started to use a few months ago. At first I didn't understand the point of having a site solely for sharing images and links - imagine having a billion pictures in one place and you basically scan through your favourites, pick them out and sort them into folders.
This is Pininterest in a nutshell. Whereas most social media sites rely on others favourite YOUR work, this site offers you the chance to favourite OTHERS.  You can build a folder for anything here - photo reference, digital techniques - tutorials. The world is at your finger tips.

The best example I can offer for this is what I do with my own pininterest account - uk.pinterest.com/thecreatorsey…

Organisation is the key with these things. You want a quick system where you know where everything is. It's a tough nut to crack and after five years of doing this, I'm still altering my workflow and how I access all those reference pictures (Because when you have close to 20,000 images to look at, its hard to get at the ones you need at the right time). The key is persistence and 'trial and error' - I can give you a starting point, but it's up to you to make it work. Everyone is different and so your style of keeping your reference in check will be different too.

Scary isn't it? Well to make things easier, let's look at ways of organising something most of you will be familar with-

 

Using Deviantart's favourite system -

Sorting your favourites to make them useable -

My way of doing this is to sort things by media. (traditional like pen and ink or digital like photoshop work) I also have a fanarts folder, which anything fanart drawing related goes into and folders for odd things like dolls or tutorials.

My point here is to make the best use of favourites, you need to organise them so you can access what you need at the time. Whatever method you use of sorting is down to you - typically I begin with these as folder titles -

Traditional materials - ink, pencil, paint drawings go here.

Art dolls, art pieces and plushies - as the name suggests, this is for dolls, plushies and odd art things like jewellery, bead work or knitting or handmade sculptures.

Digital art and media - this usually gets quite big as a folder. This is where I put anything digital related, from photoshop paints to heavily altered photos.

3d art - anything Zbrush, mudbox or maya related goes in here.

Tutorials - name speaks for itself. All tutorials, apart from coding ones, goes in here.

Resources - I'll talk about this one in the next section.

I find this is a good starting point. You may wish to subdivide your folders - meaning having each one for subject of art you favourite- like a dragons folder for (you guess it) dragon art. Or maybe a folder for a particular style like decor or inkwork.  This is artist preference. Personally I will only create a new folder if I wish to deliberately separate particular art pieces for a project or for quick reference.

Which brings me to  this -

How do I use my resource favourites folder?

-Resources to me is a piece (or pieces) that I believe I will find useful often. Sometimes it is an example of an artist technique or tools - like this ->

 

-Other times it is an actual stock image or code, like this -->

-Or sometimes it's a particular piece of art that I like the layout of or style, like this -->

 

To some people this might be a confusing way of doing things, and that's okay. The point is to take these ideas on and mould them to suit you. There is no magic way of doing things. Flexibility and the ability to evolve your ideas is the key to everything - once you've got that down, it's easy to put to practise.

 

Books and such -

There really is no limit to where to get your resources from. Any site that has a clear favouriting system will work.

Youtube's a good one for tutorials and animations - just make playlists for each thing you do and use them the same way you use folders on DA.

I avoid places like Tumblr - mostly because tumblr's reblog system can be confusing. By all means keep it as a reference resource, but you may wish to download any 'saved' pictures to a folder on your desktop.

Books tend to be overlooked these days. I myself love a good reference book - whether it be art work from a movie, or a massive 500 page book on Javascript *drools*.

If printed copies are a bit expensive, try finding free ebooks online. A quick google search will often bring up some useful stuff and even things you haven't already thought to search for.

 

The big thing to remember is that you want your most used resources to be easily accessible. Nothing worse than trying to dig out that one thing you need from the back of a drawer and the same goes for your reference materials.

And refer to your collections often - always be looking to expand your horizons and add to that growing pot of knowledge. Never assume it is finished - because the world is always changing and expanding and you as an artist are doing the same.

 Good luck

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Examples used belong to their original creators.
These examples are for educational references, but if you are unhappy with them being used, please leave a comment and they will be removed.