Birds and References

Happy mid-January everyone! This is typically the start of The Difficulties for me; the holidays are over and the new car smell of January is starting to wear off a tiny bit. It’s a good time to make gentle goals for yourself and establish some consistency. 

For this week, I have some technical resources and some fine-art resources:

1) WOW x WOW is an online-only art gallery that displays and sells a lot of beautiful contemporary art. Their newest show is called Symbiotic Loops and is open right now.

2) The Bird Whisperer Project - Amanda Makepeace and Melissa Gay started The Bird Whisperer Project years ago, and it's a really chill, inspiring way to challenge yourself every month. Reference photos are provided, and each month there's a posting day on social media to show off your painted/drawn bird and see what other artists came up with.

3) TrueRef - You might be living under a rock if you're a figurative artist and haven't heard of TrueRef yet, especially if you're in the game art and illustration spaces. So, you're welcome! TrueRef sells reference packs very reasonably and has a huge range of body types and poses. 

4) Century Library - A huge online repository for antique bookplate images, old timey illustrations, vignettes, paper textures, old world graphics scanned out of books, etc etc etc. There's a $99 annual fee so it's not free, but if you're into texture and antique illustration assets, this is a valuable resource. 

5) The Night The Stars Fell Tutorial by James Shedden - About ten dollars for a lengthy tutorial video about the making of a neat work of art. James also has an extremely reasonable deal right now for sixty phone wallpapers of his illustrations, which you can find here. Good for lovers of whimsy and artistry.

And that's it for me! Let me know if these are useful to you! Onwards to February. <3

-Steph