The first question that comes up when you begin to use photography in your paintings is the most obvious: where do you find good reference materials? If you’re a world traveler with a library of your own photos in high resolution, look no further than your hard drive. However, most of us need to find other sources of photos.
Google and Copyright
You can turn to Google, do a search on castles, and find a plethora of material. That approach comes with some obvious pitfalls. Whoever took and posted the photos online still owns the copyright. If you incorporate the photographs into a project without getting the copyright holder’s permission, you may be sued for copyright infringement. If you change an image substantially, chances are no one will know where you got the reference, but it isn’t a good practice.
Resolution Issues
Most of the images available on the Internet aren’t of adequate quality or resolution to be useful in a project. For example, if you find a perfect photograph, but it’s very small, it will be of limited application. Photos available on the Internet are usually saved as JPEGs and show compression artifacts that require substantial repainting. Flickr is an often-visited source of photo references, but there are copyright issues, plus the size and resolution vary widely. At times, you’ll find a great photo—just what you need!—only to discover that it was uploaded at 500 pixels wide when you need 2,000 pixels.
Reference Websites
Luckily, there are websites specifically designed for artists to find high-quality photo references. I contacted my favorite reference websites, and all four agreed to provide photos for use in this project. They’re stored in the Chapter 7 DVD materials. These are the sites:
- www.environment-textures.com is a subscription site that charges a little more than $100 a year depending on the conversion rate of the Euro. This site is specifically for texture artists, and all the shots are taken as straight on as possible, showing no perspective. This way, you can add the perspective yourself.
The site offers nearly 100,000 photos of anything you can think of to use as a texture: landscapes, skies, walls, rocks, windows, buildings, and on and on. I’ve had a subscription for the last five years. You can find sample reference photos in the www.environment-textures.com folder on the DVD.
- www.cgtextures.com lets you download 15 MB of textures a day for free. After you reach the limit, you must wait 24 hours before you download more photos. For a while, I restricted my use to the daily quota, but I found myself using the site so frequently that it made sense to purchase a yearly membership for $60 to support the site. As a member, you can download 100 MB a day and get access to larger files.
The site offers a wide array of reference images and some gigantic sky files to subscribers. You can find sample reference photos in the www.cgtextures.com folder on the DVD.
- http://freetextures.3dtotal.com offers a dazzling selection of textures tailored to the needs of texture artists. Usage is free. The site is growing daily, so you can check back periodically to see what has been added. Be sure to check out the sample reference photos in the freetextures.3dtotal.com folder on the DVD.
- www.great-castles.com is one of the best sites on the Internet for researching castles. It’s an encyclopedic source of large, quality photos of the castles of Europe. At last count, the site had 129 different castles, some photographed in great depth. The people who run the site love castles and offer the photos as a free resource. By special arrangement with Ron Lyons, Jr., the proprietor of the site, I’m including 40 photos in the www.great-castles.com folder on the DVD.