Digital collages will help you use your reference photos more effectively in your paintings.
You’ll be able to create more ambitious compositions, and test of a ton of options quickly, and thereby get more diverse layouts.
Demo by Art Prof Clara Lieu.
Video Walkthrough
- Digital collages are very fast and efficient, allowing you to try tons of options without a huge time investment.
- The process often goes back and forth between sketching thumbnails, gathering more reference photos, and tweaking digital collages.
- Creating a digital collage isn’t a linear experience, you will be jumping around a lot!
- The first step is collecting a giant pile of reference photos to work from.
- The more reference photos, the better!
- Often people will do a Google image search, find an image and work from that, which often leads to a lot of images looking really similar.
- A Google image search is really limited, after a while you will see that it’s the same photos that keep popping up.
- Combining photos for a composition is challenging, but it’s also going to give you a ton of variety.
- Screenshots are a really terrific option for getting reference photos.
- Many images on Google of films, musicals, etc. look very posed, or the resolution is very low.
- A screenshot will show your character in motion, giving you insight into their personality beyond just what they physically look like.
- Watching a video of the character is just as important as a reference photo if not more.
- Seeing the character move, gives you a much better sense of their personality than a still photo.
- The process can be time consuming!
- Creating so many options can make it tough to make a decisions on what you want to do, but you’ll also know that you didn’t leave any stone unturned.
- Compare 1 composition against another, it’s usually more clear which one to choose instead of looking at 10 all at once.
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