Efficient Research

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>>2763540
Aside from the obvious like google or pinterest: encylopedias and illustrated encyclopedias. They're often comprehensive and very straightforward, and can give you specific terms that names the particular things that are important for your purposes.

>>2763540

It depends on what you do. Generally it's good to set yourself goals to achieve and time limits.

If you simply need to reference a hand grabbing something, say to yourself that you will spend max 20 minutes on it or find 10 references (+ make one yourself). But that's it, 20 minute passes and you move on (or earlier).

If you actually do more complex design work, you also start from the most abstract layer and then break it down. And again, you set yourself time limit.

Say you want to make "Hell's rider". You have quite clear picture of it in your head, so you will decide that you will go only 2 layers down in your design, 10 references for each thing on first layer and 5 on the further.

In the example above:

"Hell", associations: Torture, Punishment, Fire, Heavy Metal, Underworld, Devil, Dark maybe?

I skipped here a bit, because you can ask yourself questions about it: what it is, where it is, what happens there, are there creatures eating it/living there/liking it, when does it happen etc.

Then you go for another layer, what is "Punishment" and what is associated with it: Law, Pain, Judgement, Physical Penalty, Cruelty?

You could go further, but we said to ourselves that we will stop at this layer so that's it.

Now you do the same for "Rider" and then when you seek your references, you keep the limit of what you said to yourself (5 references for second layer, 10 for first), but maintain focus: when you will seek things associated with "Law", you will combine it with "Horse" and get Horse Police picture as reference. Some things like "Heavy Metal" + "Helmet" will make sense, "Cruelty" + "Stirrup" less, but will make your creative juices flowing.

And again - set yourself limit to how long you will spend on this phase and how many references you will need.Keep things abstract, you need some clear associations that aren't outdone, a guy with flaming skull and on a chopper was done thousand times, but bull rider on a brazen/Sicillian bull?

>>2763640

Oh and thesaurus or things like that:

https://wordassociations.net/en

are your friend. It's also good to have some inside knowledge if you are doing some designs often like about the types of spiders, some things don't come in google and there's nothing you can do about it but generally be knowledgable guy/gal that has vast general knowledge and actively seeks interesting/obscure things.

>>2763640
>>2763644
This is great!
I feel like this is the stuff they don't teach, yet is super important when becoming not only a concept artist, but an illustrator in general.

Thanks, anon.