Hey tumblr, have you ever thought to yourself, “dang it’d sure be cool to set a project in something other than the current times,” but when you go to look up references on google, all you get is a horrible historical pastiche of days gone by?
Well boy howdy, do I have a reference for you!
The Wishbook Web has scans of entire consumer catalogs from past decades, ranging from the early 30s to the late 80s. Each catalog has pages upon pages of reference of clothing, accessories, and shoes for all ages, as well as toys, gadgets, and all sorts of junk that you might buy for yourself or your loved ones. While the website exclusively has Christmas catalogs, the photos and illustrations show products that you could use year-round.
SO MANY REFS OMG…
I’d like to add on top of this that all of the issues of Life Magazine (1936-1972) are available via Google Books and they are just a wealth of photography, advertisement, culture, and history. There are just some really neat glimpses into history here, especially powerful when you browse through and you can see the issues leading up to wars, and then finally the first issue after a war begins—and you know what all is going to happen (I recommend the Dec. 22, 1941 issue, it’s such a strange mix of shocking reaction to news, propaganda, hope and advertisements that act like nothing’s going on).
It’s not like looking at a history book and just reading a timeline, it’s the reactions of real people at that time, in print. It’s so neat!
(via kitseaton)
my crappy sketch process press J to skip
pretty much always but I’m bad at tutorials and I’m tired so here have a bunch of WIP screencaps or something
so yeah first get that diggity darn basic sketch down, here I pushed Fred’s pose to look more like the cartoony double-bounce step walk I reckon he would have but his proportions are pretty humany so he’s not too different structure wise
needed reference for how the cuff would crease so I took a shot of my own sleeve (egads whodathunk you can use yourself as reference)
I tend to draw things a few frames after the reference if it’s moving; it’s a habit from animation, but basically to get away from that stilted rotoscope look that some heavily referenced pictures get I try to ‘animate’ the picture and draw it as if it’s the next key frame in a sequence, so here the coat has been pushed forwards by Fred’s hand and the folds are following that through
slapped on the rest of them clothes because ain’t nobody wants a naked android strutting about, also he’s not going to be on a catwalk in the picture so I threw in some blustery wind to help that hair and action line out. You’ll probably have noticed that I also leveled out the floor so his feet are both more duck-toed and at a different perspective
throw in a loose map for the lighting and there’s your goddamn scribbley-ass sketch. After this I red line it and fix all the mistakes I’ve made before going to inking and yes there are a metric shit tonne in this one but I’m hella tired so this is as far as I got :|
hope that helped somehow but yeah, reference; it’s great, use it, but don’t copy it, copying leads to dead awkward poses that your character wouldn’t do and really you don’t learn as much from copy pasting even if it’s by hand
Got my friend David to help me shoot reference for school earlier today.
Running around and hopping over boxes is great fun when the most exercise you get on any given day is walking to the bus stop 8I;;;
FUN FACT: Now I get to film myself slamming into a wall repeatedly yaaaaaaaaay
Oh wow I know this feeling I had to pick up one of my classmates off the floor a dozen times to reference SKIP and god my back hurt afterwards.
Robert Sheehan - Hunger Magazine