
Originally Posted by
SmallPoly
It's fine - people here use photo reference and do photo studies all the time. In production art, the "correct" method is the one that gets you the intended result in the quickest amount of time. It's generally best to balance photo studies with working from life. Working from other peoples photos and paintings can help you learn color use, composition, and other techniques and lighting doesn't change if you take a long time.
The downside is that the result is much more likely to look "flat" (it's harder to observe overlaps and how the lighting wraps around teh form), the resolution, camera angle and lighting are all fixed, and most of the artistic choices have already been made for you. Working from life also lets you study the same subject from multiple angles and with any kind of lighting you want (with still lifes, at least), and always in enough detail.
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