Improve Your Drawings with Stock Photo References
Using free stock photos is a great, and enjoyable way, to practice sketching.
Back in the day, photo references were hard to come by. Now, thanks to the internets and sites like pexels.com and unsplash.com, you can search for pretty much any subject, from any angle, engaged in any action (safe for work) that you can think of. Need people walking? You got it. Three-quarter face views? Those are there too. People laughing? Yep. Old bearded dude sitting on a bench, holding a skateboard? Check.
Practice for live sketches
To me, possibly the best use of stock photo references is as practice before going out into the wild — to a festival, a farmers market, or a coffee shop — and attempting to capture the essence of a place and its people. After having drawn 100 people laughing from stock photos, suddenly it’s not so hard to sketch that cackling computer programmer in your local Starbucks.
That’s how I see stock photo sketches, not as an end in themselves, but as a means to getting better at capturing the real world.
As always, when I sketch, I try to focus on relaxing, having fun, and not capturing everything perfectly. I go for quantity and move quickly, lifting my pen from the page as little as possible.
And if you’re not happy with a particular effort, your sketchbook is a great place to try something over and over again. Remember, the goal of sketching isn’t perfection or finished artwork, necessarily. It’s about learning something each time and having fun while doing it.
