Today I want to go over a quick concept I learned about "referencing" things for your art. This applies to any art, whether it's 2D, 3D, pixel art, digital art, traditional, etc. Hopefully you find these useful. Essentially there's 3 ways to gather reference.
Referencing
What is referencing? In the context of art, I think of it as searching for or gathering visual information to apply to one's artwork. This can by done by searching for visual imagery or researching specific topics.
Why is referencing useful?
Without referencing you'd be drawing from memory, but for any normal artists our memory is limited. With reference, you draw in extra details you wouldn't easily be able to draw otherwise.
3 Methods
When I think of art referencing, I think of 3 primary ways, these aren't official terms but I think of them as "direct referencing", "indirect referencing", and researching.
Method 1 - Direct Referencing
Direct Referencing is probably the most obvious way to reference things for your art. What I mean by this is searching for images that directly relate to the subject you want to draw. For example, if you want to draw a Super Mario, you'd search up images of Super Mario, if you want to draw a castle, you'd search up images of a castle, if you want to draw a Dark Souls boss, you'd search up images of that specific Dark Souls boss. Now although this is useful to an extent, this is only useful for getting the general appearance, proportions, and colors of the thing you're trying to draw. The problem with this is that often times after the initial "sketch, shade, and color" drawing stage, you hit a road block where you feel like something's missing, but you're not sure what it is, and the art looks unpolished. If you solely rely on this approach, you skip fundamental understanding of what you're trying to drawing. It's a good start, but not everything, that's why I want to introduce these next 2 reference methods.
Method 2 - Indirect Referencing
By indirect referencing, I still mean searching for images, but these ones don't directly relate to the subject you're trying to draw. Instead you search up images that a not directly related, but similar enough to what you're trying to do. Let's say I'm trying to draw Doom Guy:
Now obviously those are very awesome depictions of him that I didn't draw, and you should use these images as reference if you were trying to draw him, but you can also apply indirect referencing to you fan art as well. Doom guy is basically a space marine who fights demons trying to destroy all humanity. This means, you can also search up space marines, or even any other similar military personnel. Maybe you can even search up some ordinary astronauts, although that's straying a bit far. You can also mentally break down his design into smaller components to search up. You can see here that he usually wears some sort of sci-fi space helmet with some oxygen filters and a glass visor so you can search that up, but you can also maybe search up some motorcycle helmets. You can search up what futuristic armor or bullet proof vests look like, you can look up shin guards, guns, space guns, camo pants, creases in pants, etc. I hope you see where I'm getting at: you can search up similar things. This approach I find very useful when I'm trying to learn how to draw a very specific aspect or element of a certain person, place, or thing's design but can't seem to get a good close-up reference image of it directly, so I work around by searching up the specific thing I need instead. I have a WIP fan art of Doom guy here:
Although overall I tried to be faithful and used reference images that closely depicted his classic design, I used some indirect referencing. I looked up some shotguns, some bicep veins, and some poses for him. Now, this drawing isn't perfect. As you can probably tell, It's a WIP without color yet, and his design could probably still be improved with further referencing, but I'm just trying to make a point of how indirect referencing can be just as useful as direct referencing.
Method 3 - Research
The last approach I want to bring up is research. So this is kind of self-explanatory, but research means basically what it's supposed to mean. Find information about the subject or topic you're trying to illustrate. In this case, Doom guy. Search up articles or videos that discuss military dudes, what they wear, how guns work, what the parts of their clothing/armor are called, why they wear them, what the different components of guns called, etc. Having this fundamental understanding will help a whole lot more than you might initially think. You might be thinking "how can I learn to draw without visuals to refer to?" Well without research, you're just "eyeballing" things and trying to mimic what they look like, but the problem is, you're more likely to make fundamental mistakes if you don't understand the rules behind how certain work or why they're needed. So do your research!
Conclusion
This is my end of my discussion about the 3 methods I use find reference as I create artwork. Next I will go over sketching. I hope you all learned something useful today and thanks for reading!