Folio and Foliage

“Reference” in art is a term that I considered dirty for a long time. I considered it synonymous with tracing, and I thought that all tracing is bad, always. This thought has been festering like a rotten shrimp in my mind since I read about a controversy surrounding Greg Land, a comic book artist who was under fire years ago for allegedly tracing a lot of photos directly for his comics. I don’t know the extent of the allegations, I don’t know how much of it is true, I haven’t actually looked into it too much, because the actions specifically are not really the point. What I saw, as a young little art-Hans in around 2015 or so, was the communities I frequented tearing this person apart for tracing photos. In these communities, mainly reddit at the time, I didn’t see much nuance. What I learned, what planted itself in my mind, was not “Tracing can be a learning tool but can be bad in finished art”, or “There’s a difference between tracing and using reference”. “Drawing from photos is bad, always”.

Here is my second drawing of Twig, from the 11th of January, 2023, along with the underlying sketch. I only really want to note two things here. Firstly, I wasn’t using a reference. That feels pretty obvious looking at the construction of the original sketch. I had the general ideas there; ‘Head is an orb with a hanging bit at the front’ and such. However I wasn’t applying them correctly, because I hadn’t used actual references, I didn’t know how to actually place them. I did much better cleaning it up to the final version, but it’s still clear that it’s all a ‘theoretical humanoid head’, not an actual humanoid head.

Photo references taken from Pinterest; Left: https://no.pinterest.com/pin/1089026753626410502/ / (Unknown source) Right: https://www.instagram.com/crispiccone/ / Christina Piccone

Photo refs taken from Pinterest; Left: https://pinterest.com/pin/1089026753626407933/ / The Saltwater Collective Right: https://pinterest.com/pin/473652085792247332/ / Carmen Granell (?)

Photo ref taken from Pinterest; https://no.pinterest.com/pin/1089026753626875683/ / (Unknown source)

Here are some of my earliest studies, dating back to the start of January. The first four, the two faces and the two poses/bodies, are complete traces. As is the muscle groups overlaid on the person at the bottom.

I here attempted to deconstruct the faces and the bodies, finding their ‘shapes’, their directions, proportions.. These are not finished works. Nor will they be. These were extremely important, however, for my learning. I’m picking up important footnotes here. While I know, from the videos I’ve started watching, that ‘the eyes are roughly in the middle of the face’, ‘the forehead is bigger than you think’, ‘most poses won’t have shoulders and hips going parallel’, and so on, these are concrete examples of that, which burn themselves into my subconscious.

Below, there is a study of torso muscle groups. This was more advanced than I should’ve gone for at the time. What I did was grab an illustration from google that showed the muscle groups (right), I found a person with pronounced musculature and attempted to overlay the different muscle group colours (left), and then I basically traced a science lab skeleton and started adding muscles freehand, trying to follow that. While I think I was on to the right track, this was (and still is) far too early for me to get into.

And this brings us to more ‘natural’ studies I did. These are from the end of January/very start of February. How I at this point was doing these studies was generally by having the original up on the side of my screen (all of these were photos from pinterest) and doing my best to study them, constructing them in various ways, trying to find the best ways for me to portray these faces and bodies. After doing that, I would then copy the a
ctual image in, put it behind, and start doing corrections on the parts that I did wrong. I still do this sometimes, and I’m not sure how useful of a learning tool it is, but my logic is that if I can see what I did wrong, and I know what to correct and how to correct it, I might spot it when I’m drawing normally when I’m more skilled. Studies like these are separate then from gesture drawings, where I (try to) avoid making corrections afterwards, as they are supposed to be done quickly.

Not long after, I did my third drawing of Twig, for the first time using a photo reference:

Photo ref taken from Pinterest; https://no.pinterest.com/pin/1089026753626411384/ / JadeyAnh (?)

 

I made a lot of changes and adjustments, the reference isn’t really recognizable anymore unless you know that it is one, at least to my eyes. Still, it looks far better than the previous version, it looks more ‘correct’. This is from the 23rd of February, a month and a half after the last one.

Overall, what I’ve learned is that using references, especially when you’re in the process of learning, is really important. How you use them can vary a lot, from what you want to learn or which parts you want to use, how you want to learn things, whether you want to focus on outline, shading or construction, I would not have been able to improve like this if not for me learning to use references, and accepting that as normal.

In my next post I’ll likely be showing off some of my gesture drawings and some more studies, or I’ll be talking about my inspirations, the tutorials and youtube art teachers I follow, etc. Whichever order I end up doing, those will be my next two art posts. Thank you for reading!

If anyone has any additional context or information around the people/photos I’ve used here, please let me know so I can update the captions. If you’re featured in any of these and would like the photo taken down, tell me and I’ll get rid of it.