How do you conceive of your paintings?

[brueghel]

Interesting Question, because I always have been fighting with myself, not to use reference because of the artistic freedom and originality "every artist should have". But thats a huge problem, because may be Im not able to visualize things as they are in reality, just from my imagination.

So I came up with my personal work-philosophy containing two modes of creating images.

1. creating Images only for training purposes - everything is allowed copying from photos, copying from other artists, or the best: copying from nature. But without raising the claim to make real art.
2. creating art. Only out of your own imagination. The time to apply all your skills that you have trained.

But I can tell you: I dont think any proffessionals are working only out of their imagination, they all tell you: "use a lot of reference!!" And thats true. But theres a difference between using reference to "puzzle" your image with many pieces of reference - or really understand the inner physics, perspective, lighting, color,... of your image and have the ability to match the perspective, shape, Light of the reference to your own idea.

I think it needs years of hard work & drawing to reach this level. But thats only my personal two pence. Looking forward for other comments.

[Lunatique]

If you really want to be able to do works that are advanced and of high quality, then you must bite the bullet and really learn your foundations. There is no substitute for that. Even artists who work exclusively from life or photos have to learn those foundations too, because they allow the artist to really understand and analyze what he's actually looking at, why things look the way they do.

When working out of your head, depending on the style, it's very possible to work completely from your imagination and require no references whatsoever. This is very true for cartoony works and stylized works in general, but the more realistic you try to get, the more likely you'll have to consult references, as the human brain just isn't capable of knowing or memorizing all the details of the entire known world. Some times you just can't find helpful references and it's not something you can easily photograph yourself, and during times like that, you just have to fake it. Use your best guesstimation of how you think things should look based on your foundational knowledge and life experiences in general.

Sometimes useful references might pop in unlikely places though--for example, screencapture from a movie or animation. When google images fail you, you could consider that route.

[Mr. D]

Hello

Also start yourself a morgue. This is reference clippings from books, magazines, and nowadays images form the web or take your own digital pics. Into it goes anything you my think will be helpful in future artwork. You'll start with none but in a few years you'll have more than you know what to do with.
No matter how good your imagination if you want to paint a winter storm at sea, and you've never seen the ocean hard to do. But don't think 'oh I might need a picture of this or that object'. Is there anything in this image that could prove useful (a reflection on a curved surface, how different metal shine, etc...)

Mr. D

[the-small-print]

Thanks for your responses so far: there's a lot of truth in them. Be suured that I have bitten and am chewing on that bullet, Lunatique: I find it's a lot like learning the guitar: you can cover other peoples' songs until your neighbours call the police but you don't start getting good until you learn the scales and keys and play around in your own way.

Brughei, that's exactly what i mean... All of what I have done so far I'd consider 'for training purposes': that is, everything I've done that I'm not slightly ashamed to look at a couple of months later, but hey, learning all the time.

It's a question which does especially intrigue me though, since i's plainly a pretty broad problem: some really well-known digital artists produce many paintings which have one or two elements which are near perfect but others which really drag the image down. These seem like clear signs of which bits they had reference for, and it's something I'd like to avoid without limiting myself: that is, the way i get around it now is by only having a couple of elements in my painting, but that is really restricting in the long run.

The kind of thing I am aiming for (in the very long term, of course) is the work of people like Craig Mullins, where you really don't have a clue where he used reference, if at all, because the lighting and colour is just right everywhere, even though the painting is of something which plainly does not exist in the real world.

I'm not too much into video-game or fantasy art, or cartoons, which maybe puts me in the wrong place, but it also seems to oblige me to get things more 'right' because they look more real. A tricky one.

And yes, I have a big fat folder of images which I swipe whenever I see something that might come in handy, but getting lighting angles to match up can be a major headache when using a reference collage approach.

I do know that some people frown on using direct refernces, but than it's always worth reminding them of someone like Caravaggio, who did many of his paintings via a camera obscure: the period equivalent of simply tracing over a photo.

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