Every artist who draws bodies uses reference, and the ones who claim otherwise are usually using it from memory, which is reference with worse accuracy. The question has never been whether to use it. The question is how, and there are a few specific places where ordinary practice turns into a problem that is entirely avoidable.

Being precise about those places is more useful than a general anxiety, which tends to make artists either avoid reference altogether, producing weaker work, or ignore the question entirely, producing occasional real problems.

Reference and tracing are different activities

Looking at a photograph to understand how a shoulder behaves under load, and then constructing your own figure, is study. Placing the photograph under a layer and drawing over it produces an image whose structure, proportions and pose belong to the photograph rather than to you.

The practical difference shows up in transfer, which is the argument in the piece on what improves figure drawing. Study teaches you something applicable to the next drawing; tracing produces one adequate image and nothing else. The ethical question and the skill question point the same way here.

Likeness is the line

A drawn figure that recognisably depicts a specific real person in an explicit context is a problem regardless of how it was made, and it is the standard this site holds without exception, as set out in the reader agreement. Real-person likeness in adult work is not a grey area.

Likeness survives more transformation than artists expect. Changing hair colour and adding stylisation does not remove a recognisable face, and the test is not whether you intended a likeness but whether a viewer would see one. Working from multiple sources, and constructing features rather than copying them, avoids the situation entirely.

Multiple sources produce original figures

Building a character from several references, one for a pose, another for lighting, another for a garment, produces something that is nobody in particular. It is also better practice, because it forces construction rather than copying and it lets you take the most useful thing from each source.

The character sheet is where this consolidates, as described in the sheet piece. Once a character exists as a documented design with its own proportions, subsequent drawings refer to the sheet rather than back to any photograph, which is the point at which the character becomes genuinely yours.

Licensing and where images come from

Photographs have rights holders, and using one as the basis of a published derivative can raise a claim even when the result looks different. Reference libraries sold for the purpose, images you took yourself, and material under permissive licences all avoid this, and none of them are expensive.

Model releases matter for photographs of people, particularly for anything adult. Where an artist commissions or shoots their own reference, the arrangement should be documented, and the people photographed should be consenting adults who know what the images are for.

Keeping records

Note what you used for each piece and where it came from. It takes seconds, it settles questions years later, and it is the same discipline as the indexing recommended in the piece on archiving your own work. Being able to show your sources is a considerably stronger position than remembering them vaguely.

It also helps the work. A record of which references produced good results is a personal library that improves over time, and most artists find they return to the same small set repeatedly once they know what it is.

Generated images deserve a mention here, because they are increasingly used as reference and they carry their own version of the same questions. An image produced by a model trained on other people’s work may reproduce recognisable elements of it, and the provenance is usually impossible to establish. Treating such images as loose inspiration rather than as construction reference keeps the resulting drawing yours, which is the same standard applied to any other source.

Using reference so the drawing stays yours

Study rather than trace, avoid likeness deliberately rather than accidentally, build from several sources, source images you have the right to use, and keep a record. Those five habits cover every version of this question that a working artist actually encounters.

Characters here are fictional and unmistakably adult, and never modelled on real people, as described in our editorial principles.