Using reference

One of the character design course was about how to use reference. Stephen Silver says that you should make reference to work for you and not opposite. You can use photos from internet or, if you're more ambitious you can make personal reference. He has shown how Norman Rockwell uses reference, and he wasn't copying reference. He studied his personal reference and make it work for himself (amazing composition and caricature of the real life as well)

I haven't done the assignment bassed on this course, yet. I just grabed one of the photo I had in my reference folders and made a dancer out of it. I will try to work for composition with that as well, because making just one character is not so hard. I tried to focus on lineart too. Usually I don't have patience to clean my roughts. I think is good sometimes to clean up drawings, it's a way to train yourself. I think that the final drawing feels like a paper-cutted doll, which was one of my intentions.

How you can see
there is more than just one or two steps in the process of using the reference.