Creating Your Own Drawing Inspirations!

Whether you're taking art seriously or doing it on your spare time, you need to have drawing inspirations. Unfortunately, inspiration is not something that can be forced.

Rather, it is something that just happens. For that purpose alone, you need to create your own library of reference materials to help it along. The more reference materials you have, the higher the chances you will get inspired!

Drawing inspirations can come from just about anything. In this topic, I will recommend a few places to build up your own personal library of references.

With that said, all artists need references. It it taking these references, combining it with their own experiences, and choosing what is important based on their artistic foundations, that good art is able to be made.

1. Picture books

Your first place to find any kind of drawing inspirations comes from physical media. Whether it be from magazines, comic strips, reference manuals, photos, or even coupons, each pictorial source adds to your collection of experiences that are important to you.

You bought a book or magazine because it appealed to you in some form or another. I want you to take note of your interests and begin studying each of the sources. Things to look for in each picture are:

• Perspective
• Object shapes
• Shading and lighting
• The organic forms (humans, animals, etc)
• The inorganic forms (building designs, furniture fixtures, etc)
• Color composition

These are just some of the things you can pick up. As long as you keep an open mind about what to look for and to study these elements, you can start building up a mental library fairly easily starting with the stuff you love.

2. Expanding your genre

Don't limit yourself to one genre. Drawing references comes from different genres that may not be related to your own. For instance, let's say your niche is cars. You can use what you know about cars to create futuristic vehicles or your own mechanical spiders that is not related to cars in any way.

Start organizing your pictorial sources into different possible genres. For example, a magazine about leisure can have picture references about boats or seascape scenery you can utilize in the near future.

Some genres to think about are (but not limited to):

• Fantasy and history
• Science fiction
• Action and romance
• Comics and cartoons
• Sports and leisure

By organizing the pictorial references of what you already have, you can see missing links to genres that you can begin collecting about. That way, you can 'fill in the blanks' as slowly build your repertoire of images.

3. Non-print references

Even canvas works from other artists shows how they think and interpret lighting, shading, and perspective. Therefore, it is an excellent idea to grab references from stuff that have already advanced passed the simple drawing phase.

If you haven't already, grab a recording device (a sketchbook, camera, video camera, etc) and start recording things from the real world that you think may come in handy such as:

• Cars and mechanics
• Houses and buildings
• Furniture and communication devices such as cellphones
• Animation and movies
• Sculptures and mannequins (for body references)
• Art galleries and physical paintings

I could go on and on. The main point is that you start looking at stuff where you can think about perspective, light, shadow, etc so you begin your study into how shapes are formed. Not only that, by building up your sources, you never know when you will get inspired!

4. Digital references

For a site that focuses on digital painting, there's no way I would forget this important source! The Internet is a wonderful place for references provided that you know where to look.

You can simple do an image search from your favorite search engine to yield amazing results about a subject you like or want to learn. With the digital medium, there is no shortage of inspiration.

Not only that, there are many digital artists out there that would gladly post their digital paintings online. Some artists are more than happy to explain how they do their digital paintings if one should ask!

Use this to your advantage and study their techniques carefully. You want to make a mental note of their digital paintings, then applying what you will learn from this site, into a digital painting of your own.

One more important source are from online photos. You can either pay for stock photos from online photo services, or you can go open-source and hit up the Wikimedia Commons to find high resolution pictures (all free!) of something you like.

Start collecting what you can and build up your own personal reference libraries. After all, there is no artist out there which is 100% original. It's an artist that takes previous ideas, combining it with his or her experiences, putting out his or her unique spin on it, and using his or her own style to create something 'original.'

Only when you build up a nice collection, you can start looking at the things you have collected to help you form your drawing inspirations.

Return from Drawing Inspirations to Digital Art Basics.
Return from Drawing Inspirations to the 2d Digital Art Guide.