If you have been following me on my World Watercolor Month 31-paintings-in-31-days challenge on Facebook, you have seen me often mention “Pixabay” when identifying my reference material. I thought maybe some of my readers might not be familiar with Pixabay, so here is the low down. I only discovered Pixabay myself a little more than a year ago. I have my friend and fellow artist Marilyn Hobbs to thank for tuning me into this exceptional source of reference photos for artists. You may remember that I am very careful of respecting intellectual property rights. In summary, except in very few cases like parody or critique, it is simply not right, or legal, to take someone else’s work and create new work from it without permission. Some people think that if they make sufficient modifications that makes it OK, but that is entering a slippery area that I simply prefer to avoid. Call me pragmatic, but I would rather spend my time painting than dealing with possible copyright infringement lawsuits. That being said, like many other artists, I need reference material to paint in the realistic style that I have come to prefer. If I want a boat to look like a boat, I need a boat to serve as a "model". I have tried to paint from memory or imagination and, with a few exceptions, it usually comes out looking a bit cartoony or illustration-like. So I need photos. Not necessarily to copy verbatim, but to get the proportions, shapes, shadows, etc. These are called reference photos. Thanks to the Internet, there is an abundance of reference material available. Many sources charge for the use of their photos, which makes sense as the people who created those photos are entitled to earn a living! Thankfully for me and other frugal creatives, there are a lot of very generous photographers out there who offer their work for use as reference, sometimes for nothing, most times for the mere mention of them as the source. I belong to one such fabulous group on Facebook with the very unoriginal name “Photos for Artists”. There are many others. I have used a good number of the wonderful photos graciously placed there by their owners. I have to mention Joe Price, Arian Rana Adair Nichols, Dianne Hewitt, Keith Saint and Joan McDaniel as I have used more than one of their photographs to create paintings. One of the requirements of this particular group is to thank the donors once you have used their photo. I must say it is a special treat to be able to interact with the creators of such wonderful photos to thank them personally. As talented as these people are, the system for searching the photos is minimal at best, so I have come to rely on Pixabay, especially for the July Watercolor Challenge. Each day has its “prompt”, and sometimes it simply does not inspire me. So I enter it in Pixabay’s search window and we are, as they say, off to the races!! Often the photos it comes up with lead me in an entirely different direction than I had considered. For example, the prompt for July 13 was “abandoned”. Before searching I thought of children, animals, toys left on park benches, things like that…. Pixabay saw old factories, houses, etc, overgrown by time and vegetation! Although there were many photos I would have liked to paint, I chose one that I thought I could paint in an hour or two…. But it opened up an entire area of subject matter that I hadn’t considered seriously. Who knows where it may lead! So thank you Pixabay! Thank you for making it super easy to post a link back to the creator of the reference photo, and thank you to all the wonderfully generous photographers who put their material there for artists to use freely. If you have any talent in photography, you could consider becoming a contributor! I and many other artists thank you in advance!
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AuthorMy name is Claire Bureau. Archives
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