I collect artbooks and have acquired a fair amount by now. I’m constantly finding new artists that inspire me and having that inspiration on hand is wonderful. Some of my favorite artbooks are the ones that focus more on the artists rough work. I like to see the messy construction work, I enjoy the aesthetic quality of those pieces and I can also start to figure out how they approached that particular subject.

Whenever I get a new artbook I heavily reference it for a couple weeks, then it sits on my shelf and only gets attention when I remember that I have it. Luckily those shelves are what holds my desk up, so the books are never out of mind. However as my collection gets larger, I find that there are some books I may have not looked at in a while.

In an effort to regularly go through all these books, I’m going to do studies from them, or drawings inspired by them on a near daily basis. So I’ll choose one artbook for a given day and do some drawings from it, or use it as inspiration for my daily drawing.

Which is what I did tonight, I chose Alien Race. The idea of the book was to visually develop this large scale intergalactic race. There are lots of sketches and paintings of the various aliens (riders and critters both).

I was looking at a page of creature sketches and was inspired to draw this guy you see here. As I was drawing he started to look sort of like a dragonborn, so I roughly threw in some indication of armor bits.

I found this exercise to be very helpful. I often try and draw everything from my imagination, but the problem is that I haven’t built up the visual library necessary to draw everything I want. Having reference open while I draw is a good thing, self, keep at it!