Hi!! I'm frothing at the mouth over how much I love your art!!! I was wondering, how much of your rendering and drawing you do from reference, and how much you do from imagination?

hi!! thank you very much!! it’ really late and i’m really tired so this is gonna be long and confusing, but here goes

i actually use tons of references, and i think this is a great opportunity to get on my soapbox of ‘use more references y'all’. i use references for poses, for anatomy, for various objects, for lighting, for color schemes: 50% of the images on my phone are pictures of myself semi-naked in various silly poses and pictures of all sorts of random shit that i took cause i thought that the lighting was super cool and i could use a similar sort of mood in one of my pictures.

however, as to how much comes from my imagination: a whole ton! i think the best way to go around using references is actually to study them and not copy them entirely. you can use shit that is completely unrelated to your illustration as reference. for example, i referenced a pic of myself holding a colander for my illustration of Essek holding a beacon. i shit you not:

what i needed was to get a sense of the angle of the elbow in such a pose as well as how the palm of a hand might interact with a quasi-spherical object of that size. as you can see, the finished illustration doesn’t look much like the reference, but it looks much better than it could have thanks to the reference and me studying it!

another example, this is the picture i used as a reference for Yuuta’s mermaid tail:

i could never come up with a fish design as cool as mother nature can, but i sure as hell can use it as inspiration for my mermaid

i often use dozens of references for one illustration alone, including 3d models, character posing apps such as designdoll and magicposer, architecture and interior design software such as sketchup, high fashion catwalk pictures, pics of my own weird-looking hands and a pic of a bug i took in 2017. the key is to figure out what you need help visualizing, find or create a reference of that specifically, and use your own logic-, imagination- and observation-based skills to incorporate that into your work!

like here:

i used this picture of my hand to get a sense of how a hand might interact with a small spherical object, and i used my imagination, logic and a lifetime of just looking at things and memorizing the way they interact with the world to depict a different sort of color scheme & lighting, replace the shell with a piece of amber, and alter the proportions in order to turn a tiny short-fingered hand into a much larger & broader long-fingered hand

tldr:

and references