Keeping Skeletons

Why you should keep skeletons 

Skeletons are a cute little nickname I have given to line art drawings or wire frame drawings. I find that they are to simplified to be called sketches - sketches I believe have more details, depth if you will. 
Many artists employ the habit of creating and keeping reference libraries to assist with their art practises. These Art Libraries vary from Artist to Artist and may include such things as; personal and stock photo's,  pages torn from magazines, textures, abstract images, inspiring works of other artists etc. Many artist keep journals to make sketches, preliminary works, thumbnails of ideas or images they see, hear or imagine - these too are art libraries.

You can create your own art library in a variety of ways:

• in actual folders, kept on a bookshelf or in a filing cabinet
• in a journal/diary/scrapbook/molskin
• on your hard drives, USBs, CDs

Which ever method you chose to store your library make it work for you, use it and add to it as often as possible - the benefits are tremendous.

Use it to 

• Boost your creativity
• Save time on future projects
• Build and Develop your skills

What you keep in your Art Library is completely up to you. But here are some suggestions.

• Photo's
• Sketches - Advanced line drawings with tonal values
• Skeletons - Basic line drawings
• Textures
• Patterns
• Inspirational works by other Artists

How you organise them is up to you - I suggest you keep different folders for each of these things and depending on the size of your library you may want to include some sub-folders

Remember don't confine yourself or your library to one source for references. Take references from everywhere.

-NikitaRose