Reference Photos for Artists: How to Take Them and Where to Find Ones You Can Use

Light from one side

The most useful reference light comes from one side and slightly above, like a window beside your subject. It puts the lit side and the shadow side on different halves of the form, which is what makes a drawing look three-dimensional. Front light, including on-camera flash, removes shadows and flattens everything. Overhead light, such as midday sun, puts eyes in dark sockets and casts a shadow under the nose.

Indoors, turn off the ceiling light, put your subject a metre or two from a window and turn them until the light falls across the face. Outdoors, open shade, such as the shadow of a building on a bright day, gives soft light with clear form.

Distance and angle

Step back and zoom, or crop later, rather than holding the camera close. At about 30 cm, faces distort noticeably: one published model estimated the nose appears around 30% wider than at 1.5 m. For people and animals, 1.5 metres or more keeps proportions natural.

Shoot at the subject’s eye level. Standing over a seated person or a pet shrinks the body and enlarges the top of the head. For a pet, that usually means sitting or lying on the floor.

Take more than you need

Take several shots of the same pose: one exposed normally, one slightly darker to keep detail in the highlights, and one slightly brighter to show what is in the shadows. Phones make this easy with exposure adjustment on the screen. Close-ups of the eyes, hands or a texture you care about cost nothing and save guesswork later.

For moving subjects, use burst mode and choose the frame where the eyes are sharp. Make sure you keep the original file. Screenshots and photos sent through messaging apps are compressed and often resized, which destroys the fine detail you need for eyes and hair.

Make sure it is big enough for the drawing

A photo that looks sharp on your phone may not hold up at drawing size. For a printed guide, aim for at least about 150 pixels per inch at the final size; around 200 ppi is plenty. A 12-megapixel phone photo (4032 × 3024 pixels) gives about 189 ppi on a 16 × 20 inch canvas, which is fine. Crop it to a quarter of the frame and the same subject drops below 100 ppi.

The practical test: zoom in on the most important detail, usually an eye, until it fills your screen. If the edge of the iris is smooth, the photo will work. If it breaks into blocks, look for a better original.

Using photos you did not take

Every photo is protected by copyright by default, and the photographer owns it, not the person in it or the person who sent it to you. “Free to download” is not the same as “free to make art from and sell”. Three types of source are generally safe within their terms.

Public domain and CC0 photos can be used for any purpose without permission. Many museums release images of public-domain artworks and objects this way. Photos under the Unsplash licence and the Pixabay content licence can be used for free, including commercially, with some restrictions on reselling the photos themselves; read each licence for the details. Creative Commons licences such as CC BY require you to credit the photographer, and some variants add conditions such as “non-commercial” or “share alike”.

For a commission, a client’s own photo of their own pet or family is normally fine. A photo taken by a professional photographer needs the photographer’s permission, even if the client paid for the session. If you plan to enter competitions, check their rules too: some require that you took the reference photo yourself.

Questions before you start

Further reading

• Creative Commons: CC0 public domain dedication
• Unsplash licence
• Pixabay content licence