A trick to paint using references faster & easier| HAND STUDY

This post includes:

• how to break down any reference to paint easily

• rendering tips

• digital painting tips

• picking reference photos for your art studies

For this art study, I aimed to pick a wide variety of lighting so that I could refresh my brain on all of them at once.

Start with the bigger picture

Start with the bigger picture.

If it doesn’t make much sense right now just bear with me, because I’m about to explain what I mean by that.

Look at your reference photo and squint your eyes until it gets blurry. Now your photo should look a lot simpler, right? Focus on the shapes and colors you see when you squint, and paint only those at first.

Focusing our brain on the bigger shapes—the bigger picture—first will make things much easier for us.

Step-by-step

Now I’ll walk you through, step by step, how exactly to paint starting with the bigger picture.

Start by taking the darkest color in the reference and paint the overall shape of the subject, like in this photo.

Next, once you’ve done that, block in the basic areas of shadows and highlights by squinting to find them. I recommend setting your brush size to something big.

And finally, make your brush size smaller for details and paint the in-between colors and other details. Use the basic color areas as the framework for where to put the details.