[johanng]

The other day I had this really exciting idea that I could see vividly in my mind and I was just dying to draw it. I enjoy drawing fantasy subjects and this was one of those where I could just see it in my mind, a fire breathing dragon, damsel in distress and so on you know the drill.

Well anyway I sat down and I tried to sketch it out but whatever I tried the dragon always ended up looking like a really mean over sized turtle oh and I am not going to go into how the damsel looked like, let's just say I was quite confused by who was needing the rescue!

What I am trying to raise here is the question of reference and the matter of drawing things that come to your mind, subjects drawn from the imagination that is.

My question is and one that is driving me crasy is quite simple I would think. Will I be bound by my need to use reference forever? Will there be a time when one will be able to draw whatever one can think of straight from the deepest depths of the imagination?

I was wondering about this because well if one is interested in drawing fantasy there will be many instances where there simply just isn't a references for what you have to draw. Unless off course someone here can point me to place where I can find photos of dragons! Hmm?
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[Chris-Mayernik]

yea eventually you will get to that point. I have allergies that are really bad and I found that when I'm breathing better I can see the image much clearer. I've spent hundreds of hours studying the human body and I can see it much clearer in my head when drawing then when I started. I know theres a difference so it must apply to every subject. You just got to study.

[Jimmyjimjim]

When working from reference, what you are doing is building your visual vocabulary. The more experience your brain has translating what you see onto images on paper, the easier it will be for you to translate what's in your head onto paper. Any concept artist will tell you that they have immense reference scrapfiles. It is imperative to use reference for problem solving.

I bring home library books from school daily, and always have them open when I'm drawing something new.

[gLitterbug]

Just on a sidenote, what do the allergies have to do with painting from ref?

[jfrancis]

Here's my take on the matter -- and I'm trying to put this into practice.

Draw something from reference. Let's say it's a skull.

Hide the reference and draw it again from memory. Focus on essential planes and basic forms, not little surface details.

You will be imediately confronted by what you don't know about it. Is the mastoid process above or below the teeth? What is directly above the last molars? Things like that.

Write your questions down.

When you use terms like "above" and "below", make sure your questions are phrased in terms of the imaginary axes of the object itself -- not the axes of the paper. If you ask questions like "In this particular view, is the base of the nose above the base of the back of the skull?" you will be memorizing a drawing -- not an object's form. The idea is not to memorize a series of drawings, but to learn the object itself, so that later you can use what you learned to draw it from any angle.

Draw it again from reference. Answer your questions.

Repeat the process with and without reference until you have fewer and fewer questions and can draw the object well without reference.

Move on to another view of it and repeat the process until you don't need reference for any view at all.

You may be surprised at how fast you can develop a "conception of form" for a complex object.

The feedback question / answer loop is better than staring at an object and trying to memorize it through sheer force of will.

[sweetums]

http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=30205
Many great illustrators and artists did their works purely from the imagination, BUT, they had their rendering basics down pat...
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Life is short. Expect nothing, enjoy everything.
That which does not kill you should make you wiser...

[matter]

when drawing something, for me it is important to think as little about what you are doing as possible - keep my mind "aloft" - in fact some times i close my eyes to scribble my idea down before trying to render it with light and form.

for something that does not exist, you must let it grow on the page - begin with loose suggestive marks, draw through figures before you try to work around them.. avoid the outline route, and always largest forms then smallest. this is hard to do until your mind has learned to work in its left-sided mode (or right?).

perhaps if you draw the dragon in schematic views, as though it were a real animal you were studying - you could first define important details without struggling to make them look right. use reference from similar lighting on similar form.
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Sorry! for any digressive, pompous, or just plain off-topic rants.

[Naeem]

glitterburg> i believe it's chris's little side-note himself. a little thought. he's talking about his experience of seeing what he's drawing better when he doesn't have allergies.

[Synnical]

'mean over-sized turtle' eh? now that I gotta see...

[Ranath]

practice replicating color schemes from reference.. when you memorize them, you can use them in any subjects, and you don't need reference. That goes to pretty much anything (like proportions, patterns, textures..)

[sweetums]

Better that trying to "replicate color schemes from reference," take the time to learn basic color theory, and work hard to use complementary colors in adding shadows and highlights to your works. Try to incorporate bits of other colors in large shapes and forms to create more coheisive visuals. It will be a far more effective use of your time than trying to guess and judge whether your work matches a particular color scheme from some other reference.
_________________
Life is short. Expect nothing, enjoy everything.
That which does not kill you should make you wiser...

[Ranath]

sweetums - replicating color schemes is meant to help you to find and understand different pallettes for different lighting conditions (for example environments). When you have replicated the overall color scheme of a certain condition, you can apply it to your painting (resulting similar lighting conditions), no matter what actual subjects of that painting are . You can see quite clearly if you have failed to match the color scheme of your reference, by the way.

I don't suggest anyone to throw away color theory here, replicating color schemes simply helps you to understand color schemes and you don't anymore have to look for reference. Before you can really understand the color schemes, you obviously need fairly good knowledge of color theory - mindless copying is no use.

You can do this by just sketching a lot too, you will just go through a lot of trial and error then.

In short, practice with reference, and you can work without it.