Why cant we use your art as reference? Just wondering!!
Alright I’m not even using tumblr much anymore but I feel like this is important.
1) you should never reference art in general. You can study art to understand how people simplify life, but you shouldn’t reference it for your art, as you WILL pick up their mistakes, and it will be harder for you to unlearn them. You should only reference life/photographs, or at the very most 3D model made and posed for this purpose. (aesthetic/mood references are another story, I’ll only talk about referencing characters here)
2) Sometimes I do just find a pose I like and do a study kind of doodle, where I put my character in the pose, and if someone saw the same photograph and referenced it too, I wouldn’t get miffed even tho our drawings would look similar (that’s common sense)(also they would look similar, but in a different way, as we’d each have referenced it in our own way).
But when I don’t just reference a single picture for a quick doodle, why should I go to the trouble of finding references and bashing them together to get what I want if some people will just waltz in and take it as is ‘as reference’. Some of y’all might be too young to realize, but the process of finding references and thinking about how to pose your characters in a way that fits their personalities takes time and effort. It’s part of the process. I’d say for me it’s about 1/4 of the time spent one a drawing. As much as you can’t copyright a pose, it feels like shit when someone comes and just copy/paste the whole pose, without having thought for one second that maybe this character’s hand was holding this object like this because of that, or that there was maybe a story behind how this character was reacting to the other.
3) There’s a weird feeling of lazyness in just skipping this process to make a weird lost-at-birth twin of someone’s artwork, and it will reflect bad on others for you if they notice it. I’m getting more general than just ‘don’t reference MY art’, and I know some people are fine with it, but to me when I see a piece that clearly ‘referenced’ another drawing (and I’m not talking about parody of very well-known work of art, let’s not play dumb here, I’m talking about your fellow internet artists), it do not gives me a good first impression of the person who did it. Tracing/copying other artworks is a super sensitive subject in the art community, and you don’t want to be associated to it by mistake.
So yeah. For yourself and the respect of the time put into the process of others, don’t use art as reference, and go find your own photographs to reference from. A lot of artists share those too, but honestly you should build your own library according to your work and sense of aesthetic. In the end, your work will feel much more personal if you don’t skip the research step.
