Using Benchmarks and References

Guide

Finding your images

The internet is endlessly full of professional examples you can use as benchmarks. When looking for benchmarks, keep in mind the delivery method and genre. Once you've decided on those, knowing the painting style, line quality, and mood you want in your work can quickly help narrow down the style you want and the benchmarks you'll use.

Collecting and organizing your benchmarks in a way that fits your workflow is important. One method is to save the images to your computer. But that can take up a lot of space, there are several sites that can help you collect your benchmarks and arrange them in a way that you can easily use while working.

Need help finding fair use images?

• Creating a new board on Pinterest for each project or drawing is a good way to collect inspiration.
• If you don't have a project in mind yet, Pinterest is a great site to create boards to collect a wide range of things from character designs to environments.
• You will need to create a user name and password

• Like Pinterest, Trello uses boards to organize your images. But instead of having external links with the images, you upload your images into different folders and have more customization.
• Trello boards can be private, public, or only shared with select people. If you're working in a group, multiple people can share the same boards and contribute to the project.

Organizing your workspace - work in context.

When using benchmarks and references, having a second screen or monitor is a great tool to utilize. If you're using one screen, having open webpages full of images can be distracting and can quickly clutter your workspace.

Placing your benchmark and reference images in a group of layers in photoshop that you can turn on and off at any time is one way to use the most of your limited screen space.