hi! I started painting again after a long time and it‘s really nice seeing your references setup! part of me is still like ‚ohh if you had perfect mastery of form close attention to a reference would be unnecessary‘ so there‘s something very reassuring about seeing someone make skilled and clearly original work while working from obviously carefully chosen references. Like, choosing references that work well for a piece is part of the creation, but I didn‘t really think of it that way before seeing yours. Thanks for sharing :3
I've had a lot of people say this to me before, it makes me happy every time. I think so many people, even when they know it's not really rational, get scared of using references. But isn't the entire point of art, trying to interpret your world? I think art is best the less we try to stay in our own heads. It's about communication, interpretation, internalizing something and showing people what you think about it so they can maybe feel what you feel for a moment, without any words being exchanged.
(Kind of a tangent but this is why I don't write descriptions for my art; I welcome others to do so, but I don't like telling people what to see. I like seeing tags where people interpret what I've drawn different from what I intended.)
The greatest artists have used references. Have traced, even. I've made some posts about it in the past, talking about the camera obscura and stuff like that. I think the best example is still Norman Rockwell, since we have photos that allow us to compare:
Here's an article talking about his process: https://petapixel.com/2012/12/27/the-photographs-norman-rockwell-used-to-create-his-famous-paintings/
The point of art is not in the skill/difficulty required to make it. Personally, the more a piece of art focuses on the technical skill, the less interested in it I am. It feels like nothing more than bragging to me. I look at that kind of stuff and I just hear 'look what I can do!'
Rather, it's about communicating. Just like I said before. So I think that using any tools available to make it easier to show people what you want to show them (and I gotta add an addendum in here because AI people act like this is what they're doing; AI will never understand your vision, it cannot understand context, and it cannot create something purposeful, and is impossible for this purpose)... I think that's all that matters.
Now... I have heard that photographs are a problem because they force you to see something flat instead of on a 3d plane, and because it compresses colors. But at the same time, if I were to rely only on what I saw, I would never have been able to draw as many things as I can. I did not have a child in my life for over a decade until just two weeks ago, when my nephew was born. How would I know how to draw chubby cheeks as well as I can? I live in a very white area, how would I know how to draw a diverse range of faces and skin colors as well as I do?
I have tried to create my own references before, using just myself and my camera. But another thing is that I'm 4'11, and as it already is, I struggle to draw long limbs, even when looking at a reference of a model with those very limbs. It'd really be kneecapping myself to please an imagined audience. No one has ever come to me and insulted me for my process. It'd all be in my head.
I think it's a beautiful thing that computers exist, so I don't have to worry about fumes or how much paint I have or making sure I don't fuck up the color blend I have when I need more paint for an area than I thought I did. I think it's a beautiful thing that the internet exists, and I can find any range of people and objects and environments all across the world, in any pose or setting or time of day or angle that you can imagine. I don't think that people should be so quick to discount it. I think a lot of discounting it is, truly, based on Capitalism and the vilification of anything that doesn't follow the laws of copyright, when so much beautiful art would have never been possible if it were created during a time when copyright law existed or was as strict was it is today (current copyright law is the life of the author plus 70 years; Lewis Caroll died in 1898. Disney's Alice in Wonderland came out 53 years later). And so much beautiful art that exists in spite of it, like Nosferatu.
I think as long as an artist wants to learn, wants to grow, and wants to show people how they feel, what they think - I think it doesn't really matter what their process is. It's art. That's what matters.
