The Reference Are

So I promised a large image drop post and it never materialized. Well, one or two bouts with teh sickness (Nickelback or whoever sang that song not included) and one set of nointernetitis later, we're back for the '08, with the newness.

So anyway, getting into it, today is all about reference, or "Scrap" as a couple of my teachers like to call it, or as I like to call it "pictures that look like stuff I'm going to draw". Whatever you refer to it as, it is indispensible to any illustrator looking to make something look like something else, even if you're going to distort it, or simplify it, reference is an important part of getting the feel right. Of course it's not the end all and be all, and going too close can lead to all sorts of problems, but as my illustration teacher pointed out to us: "Can you draw your cellphone from memory...exactly? you look at it all the time, but can you get all the details down right?" maybe you could, but you had to think about it a second didn't you? Well, same goes for anything else.

So I went through a ton of image sites and came up with a list of some based on some very indeterminate criteria. All I did was search for the same image (dog snarling) in each site and see what I got. Sites that gave a wide variety, different images than other stock places, keywords, tags, had an easy to use layout all got special notice. (and just to point out my bias, I use Getty Images pretty regularly, and that was basically my baseline). And I am not looking for resolution or price, just quality and variety of images, just looking for the visual information.

The Good
-Getty - easy to use, lots of tags/filters, large collection, only drawback is being unable to resize results so you can view more on one page.
-Alamy - keywords, big variety of results, can change results amount.
-Superstock - tons of images, tags & checkboxes included. A really well done site, if I didn't automatically punch in getty, this would be my default.
-Flickr Creative Commons - another well organized search using the Flickr pool of photos. harder to be specific as with Getty or Superstock, but the image results are wildly different than stock style.
-The Marsden Archive - Not very good at all-around, but I'm including this one because it features amazing spooky and gothic style stock images that are worth just looking at. There's a whole world of nice stock art which I didn't get into, because I wanted general, but this caught my eye, but if you have a specific topic in mind, and search for that plus stock images in the google, you're more than likely to find it.

The not-so-great
-Veer - decent results, very few tags, hard to specify.
-Corbis - no tags, less stock , more newsy style photographs in the results.
-Das Fotoarchiv - Newsy, almost too many tags.
-Aurora - meh.
-Punch Stock - decent returns & Keywords.
-Urban Dirty - texture based site, still I prefer just looking in google images for texture.
-Morguefile - arty results, however you want to take that.
-SXC - meh.
-123RF - royalty free images, low results.
-Graphistock - illustration based returns, good if looking for a idea jumping off point more than reference images.
-PD Images - Public Domain Images.

not reference, but damn cool
-I could do a whole post on image gathering sites, kind of like Del.I.Cio.Us or whatever it is, but there are a couple sites out there where people tag images they like and post them for others to see and whatnot. Ffffound my be the best of them, always something interesting going on there, almost always illustration and design based. Riot Clit Shave is more photography based, people usually post collections of interesting images. And finally, there's Space Ghetto, which, unlike most things, is a pretty accurate name, definitely a site not for the faint of heart. /b/chan is another place, but man, do you really want to enter that realm? stick with the image aggregators.

the bad
-I'm just going to list these, with no links, but these aren't even worth your time:
Comstock, Heffernanicons, Photonica, Photovault, Mira, The Image Bank, Dexhaus, Pixelib, Shutterstock, Dreamstime, Stockvault, Tastystock, Turbophoto.

There it is. This is all what I could find searching on my own, but I know there are a bunch more out there that I know about and have forgotten the name, if you have one you use I would love to hear about it. And as I hear of more, I'll update this post.