I'm curious how you organize your reference stuff

[ratcreature]

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

Comments

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Hm. Mine are more for writing, but reference books have their own bookshelf. I had a drawer-full of magazine pages....evening gowns and costumes, articles on tv shows, that every so often I'd take out and sort through when I was blocked.

[ratcreature]

I think if it was just one drawer it would be less of a problem. Besides the shelves with books and magazines in folders, I have a some stuff in hanging folders, and some stuff in stacked boxes...

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Do you keep the whole magazine, or just tear out the revelant pages? Maybe doing that and filing them in folders by subject?

[ratcreature]

That depends. If a magazine is more of the photo report type with several interesting pictures, like National Geographic issues, I just keep the whole thing, if I find one image interesting I just keep that. I admit I'm not that good with filing. Unfortunately for the most part it's that I see something interesting, and just put it on a pile... Part of the reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking of organizing it at all in the first place. I mean, I tried with the hanging folders but then didn't stick with it, and these days I find a lot online so it never seems that pressing, exept whenever I can only find crappy resolution pictures on the net, and am sure that I had something in a pile somewhere that would work better. *G*

[friendshipper.livejournal.com]

For a while, i was storing mine in hanging folders -- for example, gun magazines together, clothing catalogs together, dog magazines together. This fell apart when the filing cabinet got too full and I wanted it for something else anyway, so I dumped all my magazines and such into a box, and things have gone steadily downhill since.

The best strategy that I can think of -- the one I vaguely intend to use for myself if I ever get around to it -- is to find a bunch of small boxes or file folders and sort things out by type, e.g. pets, household objects, cars, deserts, etc. At this point, though, not only have I not bothered, but I'm not sure if it's worth it because I so rarely check back to my magazines anyway unless I'm looking for something really unusual -- Google Image Search is so quick and handy for nearly any kind of common art reference. Usually the only cases where Google doesn't work for me are situations where I need general inspiration for a character or vehicle design more than a specific piece of reference art, and in that case, leafing through a book works better anyway. (My bookshelves, by contrast, are pretty well organized.)

Edited to add that I've found it helpful with thick magazines like National Geographic to use scraps of paper to bookmark specific pages of interest. For me, Nat'l Geo is more of a story/inspiration reference than an art reference anyway, so I bookmark articles of use.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, image searches have certainly cut down into the use of the hardcopy things, but I find that often with web images the resolution isn't so great, like say you want to design a fantasy costume and look at Samurai armor and some medieval stuff, the result numbers go down fast if you limit to large images to really get detail. Whereas if you have a magazine article about some armor exhibition with photos, the resolution is better. Also, for pretty landscapes for example, well it is hard to find search terms if you can't think of a place that looks like what you have in mind, so I prefer to collect interesting scenery beforehand (whether on paper or digital) so that I can just flip through pictures.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

I used to spend whole evenings crouching on the floor, cutting pictures out of Geo and other magazines, sorting them into categories, and putting them into large office folders. Recently I realized that Google image search has made that picture archive obsolete, so I threw it all out.

I have a couple hundred books which I sort, hm... I try to keep the ones I need most often where they're easiest to reach. And I divide them into comics, kids' books, and specialized books sorted by topic. It's not much of a system, really. ;) But my memory works in weird ways, in that I can't remember faces at all, but usually have a good idea where I put which book, and where to look for a particular picture.

And Google image search rulz all. \o/

[ratcreature]

I <3 Google image search too! Though I'm always sad when I find an image that would makean awesome reference and someone put it on the web only in some really small size so that you can't really see the detail.