Ognjen Sporin

Using Good Reference

Added 2021-08-20 06:32:21 +0000 UTC

A huge part of making a believable painting is finding high quality reference. The images you find will inform details and anatomy of things, but they still need to be filtered through your conscious choices and serve the big picture, and learning how to not copy reference is a skill in itself.

So I figured it might be useful to show some of the reference I sued for this painting. I use PureRef for making reference boards and so should you: https://www.pureref.com/

Here's what my ref board for this painting looked like:

I usually start collecting reference pretty freely, not exactly looking for anything specific but just picking up whatever I find interesting or inspiring. It's useful to pull ref from multiple sources, like google, pinterest, artstation, sketchfab.

Sometimes I'll already have an idea or sketch for the painting, and sometimes I'll get the idea by looking through different references. This image sparked the idea for this painting:

I liked the idea of a stranded sea dragon, and I particularly liked the black sand contrasting the white creature, so that was a key element I wanted to keep.

I looked up some black beaches and some stranded whales and squids:

I used the middle left image pretty heavily for the environment, both the black sands, the wave forms and if gave me the idea for carved rock monoliths. I took the sky from the bottom left image, and invented a lot of the squid, although I took the red color from that other reference.

I also collected these as inspiration, but didn't take a lot from them, just a bit of that scratchy thick whale skin texture.

Here's an early WIP of the image:

You can see I pretty much nailed down the all the big things (except the rocks) before getting into painting it up and adding brushstrokes.

Also, check out how strong and cool the fresnel effect in this image is:

The wet sand near the water is much more reflective than you might think, and without reference and that blue sky reflection it might look off but you just wouldn't be able to figure out why.

Here's a very succinct explanation of the fresnel effect: https://www.dorian-iten.com/fresnel/

Hope that was useful :D