For those people who think that artists who paint in classic-style don't use models I'll have to tell you that they do. So do I. But I do have a problem with using them. It somehow reminds me of my childhood where I wanted to be a good illustrator but I wasn't yet. I could draw things pretty good if I had a model but I was pretty crappy without it. As a child, as many others, I admired very much for example Marvel/DC comic artists and others who obviously didn't use models but could draw from their own imagination! But I never was good in drawing/painting naturalistic stuff without some references.

I don't like to use photos but many times I have to. When I'm doing something not so realistic then I of course just draw it, but making realistic cast shadow and lights are always very difficult for me if I don't have any three dimensional objects or photos as models. And I'm not very good in drawing natural, realistic humans without models, some poses and for example the folds in clothes are always a pain in the arse.

So what kind of photo references I'm using in my work? Usually they are like the embarassing picture in the previous post. A bad quality digital camera photo. I try to use as much as  I can my own photos, but sometimes because of the very tight schedules I have to use clip art  photos and other copyfree material. And if -for example- some character I draw carries a Nikon camera, I'll for sure go to Google to find an image of Nikon, and I don't have a bad consciense because of it.

Because of the thing that nowadays I'm so used to use photos, I sometimes use them also as part of the sketching process. (And many times I also use different 3D objects to find the right angle for the picture, I'll post about it sometimes later) I'll put here couple of work-in-progress pictures of the cover art I did for "Howl's Moving castle" by D. Wynne Jones.

First the final work (done completely in Photoshop)...
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And here's some previous versions I found from my harddrive. Good thing I sometimes forget to erase everything! Here you can see I combined some photos of european houses with wacom-sketching and Photoshop-painting.
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And here's one later version. You can also see here that the lighting of the picture is very much different than in the final result. The agent of the author (and it also had something to do with Studio Ghibli) didn't want our Finnish cover art to be so "Miyazaki"-style, so we had to change it to much darker atmosphere. In this picture, I've used photos for the mountains in the back, photos for parts of clouds and also photos for some parts of the ground.
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When I use this technique, I have some sort of sketch how the final result should look like (It's also first shown to the client), but I may alter the sketch at the same time I progress in the work. I colour layers on top of the wacom outlines and on top of the photoparts (using brush tools with Wacom). As you can see, for example the stones in the front look quite different from the final, but these kind of photos help me to sketch the composition. So its also possible for me to use photos in the early stage of the design but you can't really spot them from the final work.


As always, using clip art material, or using photos from royalty free galleries, include the danger that the same picture is published in some other place. That's also one thing why I'll try to stick up with my own photos. But I almost never use a picture as it is, I always take just some small part of it. When I was working for WSOY book publishing company, I sometimes had to do the final cover art in 1 hour or 2 tops. Then I just went trough clip art photolibraries, picked up a picture, put some noise and filth and filter on top of it. As a freelancer I hope I can plan my schedules the way I don't have to do covers in couple of hours.

This is an example of a WSOY cover done that way (in a hour). This is an old one, so I'm sorry I don't have the original photos anymore.
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Sometimes it also happens that I use the same photo reference twice and not realise it. Or not care about it. And that's annoying when people spot similar elements in different artworks :)