Reference photos

All my photos in this blog, my Russian blog, Picasa or Flikr are OK to use as an artist reference (for paintings, sketches, drawings). I'm not greedy (well not too greedy, I hope). I would love to see what you do with them but of course it's not mandatory. I normally take only low resolution pictures because they are good enough as reference for my artwork and I can take really a lot of them.

There is a good reference library at
http://www.wetcanvas.com/RefLib/
but you have to be a member (its free) to save images.

I can't remember where I took this. Must be in a castle in England.

Random Images 1

Sometimes I'm lucky to see real beauty right from my window. That's how the American winter landscape on the left has been made.

I do take hundreds of photos every time I go out in hope that one day I can use them for my artwork. They constantly appear in random order on my desktop.

My wild imagination and dreams often bring me vivid pictures worth painting.

I like using 3D modelling for creating landscapes and/or people to paint later.

I also feel its fine to be inspired by random photos in books, newspapers, on the web, in movies. After all, I'm not copying them photorealistically, merely interpreting. Artist Pablo Picasso said "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." And, of course, all artists & photographers steal from God a bit... Poor Van Gogh copied his favorite artists when couldn't afford live models.

Last, I sometimes do copies of historic art from all over the World to learn about old masters approach.