Reference, Exactly

Muddy Colors · Aug 17, 2026

Recently a couple of different students have mentioned to me that “they don’t get a chance to see artists’ reference side-by-side with their finals all that often.” Hmmmmm.

Now, there is a literal shitstorm of posts and articles out there featuring this theme, but I think the root of these comments is that we can all sense a little…falseness in these posts, from time to time. I’ve seen articles where the artist is obviously sharing a picture from the same shoot, but not THE shot; not the shot they actually used to paint from – and keen students sense this as well.

Of course, it…