I'm curious how you organize your reference stuff

[ratcreature]

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Hm. Mine are more for writing, but reference books have their own bookshelf. I had a drawer-full of magazine pages....evening gowns and costumes, articles on tv shows, that every so often I'd take out and sort through when I was blocked.

[ratcreature]

I think if it was just one drawer it would be less of a problem. Besides the shelves with books and magazines in folders, I have a some stuff in hanging folders, and some stuff in stacked boxes...

[madripoor_rose]

Do you keep the whole magazine, or just tear out the revelant pages? Maybe doing that and filing them in folders by subject?

[ratcreature]

That depends. If a magazine is more of the photo report type with several interesting pictures, like National Geographic issues, I just keep the whole thing, if I find one image interesting I just keep that. I admit I'm not that good with filing. Unfortunately for the most part it's that I see something interesting, and just put it on a pile... Part of the reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking of organizing it at all in the first place. I mean, I tried with the hanging folders but then didn't stick with it, and these days I find a lot online so it never seems that pressing, exept whenever I can only find crappy resolution pictures on the net, and am sure that I had something in a pile somewhere that would work better. *G*

[sholio]

For a while, i was storing mine in hanging folders -- for example, gun magazines together, clothing catalogs together, dog magazines together. This fell apart when the filing cabinet got too full and I wanted it for something else anyway, so I dumped all my magazines and such into a box, and things have gone steadily downhill since

[ratcreature]

Yeah, image searches have certainly cut down into the use of the hardcopy things, but I find that often with web images the resolution isn't so great, like say you want to design a fantasy costume and look at Samurai armor and some medieval stuff, the result numbers go down fast if you limit to large images to really get detail. Whereas if you have a magazine article about some armor exhibition with photos, the resolution is better. Also, for pretty landscapes for example, well it is hard to find search terms if you can't think of a place that looks like what you have in mind, so I prefer to collect interesting scenery beforehand (whether on paper or digital) so that I can just flip through pictures.

[astridv]

I used to spend whole evenings crouching on the floor, cutting pictures out of Geo and other magazines, sorting them into categories, and putting them into large office folders. Recently I realized that Google image search has made that picture archive obsolete, so I threw it all out.

I have a couple hundred books which I sort, hm... I try to keep the ones I need most often where they're easiest to reach. And I divide them into comics, kids' books, and specialized books sorted by topic. It's not much of a system, really. ;) But my memory works in weird ways, in that I can't remember faces at all, but usually have a good idea where I put which book, and where to look for a particular picture.

And Google image search rulz all. \o/

[ratcreature]

I <3 Google image search too! Though I'm always sad when I find an image that would makean awesome reference and someone put it on the web only in some really small size so that you can't really see the detail.