Hey, everyone, this is Urgo, Josh, and I am super excited to get back to YouTube,
but this isn't the video I wanted to do that with.
I'm actually working on a really fun Studio Tour video.
It's going to be one of the best videos I've ever made on this channel so far.
I'm really excited about it, but it's taking a little bit longer than usual.
So I think it will be about next week when it's going to be released.
But in the meantime, I wanted to share with you a portion of the reference video,
the lesson I made on my patreon page, the four videos, 38 whole minutes long .
And a lot of my patrons said that
they're going to be watching it over and over again to be able to absorb
all the information that's there. So if you're interested in that.
Check it out. Link in the description.
But without further ado, please enjoy this portion of my references. Lesson.
So this brings me to how to find good references, right?
I think this is pretty much all you need to get started to start
finding good reference, and you should be using Pinterest, number one,
because Pinterest is just a collection of all the other images online .
And it's a very, very, you know, well curated fashion.
The thing that I get, though, was like, oh, how do you find that?
How do you find that, Josh? I can't.
And when I search for this, I don't get it.
Well, first off, those people who ask me that are usually trying to find out
exact image and we already talked about why you don't want to be doing that.
So that's always going to be frustrating no matter what you use.
But also don't do that. Use the algorithm.
Don't just search.
I skipped that. Don't just search for stuff.
Use the algorithm to let it tailor itself to your tastes. Right.
I already have that happening for me.
So let's see what the algorithm thinks that I want to look at right now.
This business thing is always annoying.
So this is what it thinks I want to see on my homepage, right?
A lot of girls, a lot of drawings of girls and things like that, and it's tailored.
Some of you I'd be like, wow, I wish I like
you might be getting inspired from some of these
and you might want to, you know, like even something like
this is really cool to use for
opposed to kind of build something off of later.
And then I just have this happen and I scroll through and I add them
to different boards that have even more specific tastes to them. Right.
You use the algorithm and let it find stuff for you.
So like I have this face is one that I've been building for a long time.
This 1400 pins here. If I want to find
more stuff like this, specifically, like these images,
I can click more ideas and all of a sudden I get only portraits . Right.
Or mostly portraits at least.
And I can go back and let's look at another one.
Let's look at style builder. Right.
This is this personally stuff that I
the style that I like and I can go to more ideas.
And we can see there's all kinds of artworks
here of a certain style that I really like and I can find more artists
and more inspiring stuff to look at when I'm working
on trying to develop my own style
right from all kinds of places, from content, from specific artists.
So that's what you want to be doing.
I have my Patreon linked or my Pinterest linked.
I'll link that under the video, if I can remember.
And I have that linked here as well, so that you guys can follow my boards
and find some things to help get the algorithm used to you. Right.
Next up is Artstation.
It is for usually industry concept art.
But here again, don't search.
Don't use the really crappy like filtering system they have.
You want to just look at artists that you like and then find their likes.
So neuroscientific live. I talked about him already.
I'll just go to his likes. He has 3000 likes.
He's curated a list of artists for me and artworks
that I find interesting that I don't have to search for.
So I remember this is how I discovered Gloss.
Very similar type of artwork, very bubbly, very soft
and easy to look at and just enjoyable.
Very good at painting lips. Right.
And I wouldn't have discovered this artist if I didn't look at their likes.
And this kind of happens.
A lot of artists kind of know who's who and enjoy different
things about different artists.
And you can kind of follow in their footsteps.
I remember learning from this artist right here.
I don't even know how to say their name.
They just go by. It's here.
But they have a specific way.
They break down for them that I really, really loved.
And I would have never found them
if it wasn't for just checking out the like.
So I have all these artists that I follow
and then I check their likes every now and then.
And then that's how I discover more art to study from in build my style.
Lastly, we have pics of here.
There's a lot of really, really great anime and manga,
and I wouldn't show it now because I didn't prepare it in advance.
But it's the same thing is art station again.
Just look through, create your own account, find artists that you like
and follow their likes and pics of also has a really good algorithm, too.
So every time you click something, it shows you more.
And every time you favorite something, it shows you more stuff.
And it can be addictive with you, like the type of art that's on there.
It's all the highest to your highest quality
anime, manga style artwork that you're going to find online.
You're not going to find anything is good on Pinterest or just Google search.
And here's some bad references and habits to avoid.
So this is something I think is going to be really, really important.
You want to focus in on this.
And the first thing is going to be for faces especially.
But really anything flatlining.
You want to avoid pictures like this high make up, high
like glamor, beauty, photo shoots.
You don't want to study from these. Look at her eye.
It's incredibly difficult to understand what's actually going on here
with the form with her eye.
But here, even though she's much fairer skinned, which is usually harder
to find a nice, you know, meeti, I know I describe it like a nice depth
pictures with a lot of depth.
You know, usually have they usually have to tend to have fair or darker skin.
It's easier to find that depth there.
But here, you know, with someone, even with this person,
with an Asian ethnicity in their faces tend to be flatter.
This image has so much more information about the highlights in the form.
Just because the lighting is different and it's still pretty lighting.
You know, it's not meant to be dramatic like over here, but there's a lot more
you can tell about the anatomy of the eye.
You can get a feel for the entire eyeball and here
and how the eyelid wraps around the top in the bottom.
And you can get a feel for the skeleton
that's under in the skull that's under here, here.
It's also airbrush and heavily made up.
And the lighting is flat.
There's a ton of images like this that you see in magazines.
Avoid these. You're
not going to be able to study good lighting and planes from that.
Now, if you're trying to study proportions
and you're just trying to study, you know, like
beauty in and of
itself and you're trying to convey that, then, yeah, you should look at those.
But you should know that
if you're understanding of forms and the structure underneath is not good,
you're wasting your time studying that because you're drawing
still won't look good.
Trust me, you got to study the forms in the structure first
before you can get into the like the pretty stuff.
And as a matter of fact, I'm just going to go straight to one of my favorite
hey, my favorite places to just look up.
I think it's (@earthsworld).
@earthsworld
These are the type of photographs you want to look at
if you really want to understand how to draw the face
and all these different types of people, look at the lighting here.
You can really get a clear understanding of all of these little forms
that happen on different people, different ages, different skin textures,
all kinds of things.
And the lighting is so dynamic and you can get a clear, clear
sense of what you should be focusing on and what you should be simplifying
when you're studying different faces. Right.
And then if I go back to this one, you can see
this is kind of like halfway there and this is like, no, stay away from that.
But this has a lot
all of these have so much soul
and character to them, if you can study this kind of stuff.
Everything you do is going to be way better.
So the last things in me, warped
images will not the last thing, but warped images stay away from those.
You don't want to be doing crazy focal lengths.
Usually, you know, those kind of like selfie cameras
that people do want imposed on Pinterest and I mean Instagram.
Don't look at those.
Those are going to be really, really messy with how your face looks.
So I have a few examples here.
There's like 20 millimeter lens versus like 70 millimeter.
And you can see here his nose is much smaller than it is here.
And when you start getting into different angles and stuff like that,
it can be really tricky unless you really know what you're doing.
And now here we are on the last page,
which is kind of a really important metal thing.
That is a suggestion.
But I think it's still important if you really want to take this seriously
and get good at observing life and using reference properly.
And the first thing is to limit your consumption of social media. Yeah.
Because what happens is we are training our brains to just dump
even more information than before. Just think about it.
Your parents were not looking through thousands of images and videos per day.
They were looking at real life and they were walking
the same routes or taking the same routes to and from work. Right.
That facilitates creativity. Have you ever been given a task?
And then they say just do whatever the hell you want.
All of a sudden you have no ideas.
But when there's a limit, when there's a challenge,
all you have so many ideas of how you can make this really work. Right.
So many different ways
to kind of bend the rules a little bit to get your idea to really shine.
So don't be like these two people here.
We want to be like these people, right.
With their mask on going out to see the world.
You want to be like these kids right here looking deep into the world.
That's what we used to do.
We all used to do this. We're looking we're interested.
The smallest thing taking in the world,
taking in references from the world so that it builds our creativity.
And we can imagine little worlds going on right beneath our feet.
You don't want to be like these people are here all day
just looking at their phones, learning, telling their brain that like, oh,
images don't matter.
All of this stuff doesn't matter.
Just dump it, because I'm going to look at something else
and I can't bear to remember all this stuff.
And then lastly, and probably most important is don't aim for perfection
and you're not really going to do this.
If you listen to the things I said before, where you're not just copying images,
you're going to always be disappointed if you're trying to copy
and aim for perfection.
So let's try to find something. Get on Pinterest here.
Let's see. I'm just going to look for something that I might feel like
I want to paint something that would inspire me in general.
So like here, here's a good example.
I really love this because of the angle that her face
is that in the lighting and all the texture.
Imagine trying to copy this and make it look just like how it does here.
It would be terrible.
What I want to do is when I use when I find this sit down,
write down what I like about it.
Spend five minutes looking at it, literally spend that much time,
look at every single part of it, then make my own sketch
with my own fundamentals and skills that I've learned. Right.
Even if I have to create like a little diagram for myself, really
what's going on, things I don't want to miss, like this line here going strap.
I really want to make sure I don't forget about that
when I do a sketch and I just start my own and I do it myself.
And then I casually refer to this once I've spent a few minutes
with my own drawing,
occasionally refer to it
to get the details, like, OK, now I want to study the fabrics of this
and I want to make sure I get the lighting right.
You know, that's after you've done a few single fundamental focus studies,
because, of course, you don't want to just be studying everything at once.
But here, this would just be like a casual thing you do for fun anyway.
And so that would get you a good drawing where you're not worried
about trying to be perfect.
You think about what drew you to this in the first place, how you found this.
You hopefully weren't didn't find this by just searching for 30 minutes
on Pinterest, because, again, you shouldn't be doing that
because you're starting from your own ideas first
or you're starting from a fundamental you're trying to study.
No more spending 45 minutes scrolling Pinterest,
you're going to be doing stuff that's deliberate.
And so if you deliberately find this and you want to deliberately study this,
it's going to be a much better experience.
And whatever you come up with is going to be you.
It's not just going to be a copy of this thing.
And that's going to give you satisfaction
and wholeness in your work and is going to give you skills
that can serve you for the rest of your career.