Life Drawing and Figure Art

The 4 best places to get Free Images

Comment Written by Figure Drawing on July 3, 2009 – 12:43 pm

I made Life Drawing and Figure Art so that Artist’s would be able to find all the best figure Art and Life drawing reference and resources gathered in one spot. If you try to use Google to find reference it can be very frustrating as typically the same images show up time and time again.

I recommend you save some time and try out the following sites.

Morguefile:

All Free and gathered by other artist’s like you. The license is as follows:

Istockphoto:

When using any stock photography site be careful that you don’t publish your work as original if you don’t pay the full license amount. Great for practice of clothed figures. Almost anything you feel like drawing is easy to find. There will be a watermark and the images will be in low resolution.

Character Designs an Artist’s Resource:

This is a really great but limited resource. An artist can find a lot to practice on. Warning some images might be considered a little risqué for the more conservative artist.

I  found this great little tutorial on how to use photos. It will help you to look at your photo reference with your own filters and learn to not copy exactly what you see. There is nothing worse than looking at a drawing that looks like a photo.

Finally if you type into Google “Nude Photography” you can get a lot of sites. If you do this I recommend that you be prepared for some offensive images. I recommend that you add “black and white” to your search as well as “portraits.”  This will help filter out the more unsavory sites.

When you look at professional photographers images try to study the lighting and the advanced compositions. This is a great study guide but  remember that you are not the original author and try to give credit to the photographer when you sign your work.

Once you get some practice and are ready to spend a little money on some true reference we recommend the following links:

Human Anatomy for Figure Artists

Virtual Pose Book Series

Both these series have been put together by people who understand what an artist is looking for when the set out to draw the figure. The photo’s have been designed for maximum clarity and subtlety. I use them all the time.

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