I like to paint from photographs, and I have a fairly substantial reference folder with a hundred-plus images that I’ve taken. I’ll occasionally supplement those with images from other sources. There are copyright questions regarding this practice- for an example, see the copyright case between the Associated Press and artist Shepard Fairey. Although the art that I produce is in a whole different ballpark than this example, still, I’d rather avoid that kind of problem. There is a good, copyright-free website called Unsplash that a very large selection of images that you can use as reference material, especially photos of birds.

Bird photography is difficult. Ideally you need a good, powerful telephoto lens, and lots of time and patience. Fortunately, the birder community has this in spades, and they’ve posted some really nice images to unsplash. I used one to paint the study of a heron below. This one will stay in my files, as it has a rather obvious error that I didn’t see until it was completed… see if you can spot it!