Using reference material

Just since a couple weeks ago I properly started using reference material for my illustrations and in general my art looks so much better.
I used to not like reference material since I would always copy the source material, find it hard to take inspiration from it and just make a copy.

Which isn’t bad either but not the right way I could’ve used it. Also I just wanted to draw, and looking up source material and reference pictures takes some time. Luckily thanks to a newfound love for Pinterest (which I used to dislike for various reasons) it’s a lot faster to find proper reference material. I still do have some issues with Pinterest, mainly finding inspiring art but not being able to find the original artist hence the artist not being credited, and Google reverse Image Search doesn’t work very well with black and white pictures.

In my teenage years I always used Google Images but this has proven to become just another online store. Try finding a good reference picture without getting a lot of advertisements which are filled with overly edited photos, they look good for customers but these are usually unusable, and uninteresting, to use for illustrations.