Reference Imagery

For me, finding reference material is usually a case of trolling through Google Images until I find what I'm looking for but sometimes something really catches my eye, so I wanted to share these on my blog.
  
Charles Fréger

Creative costumes of still practiced pagan rituals in Europe.

"Tribal Europe"  Part of Charles Fréger's "Wilder man" series, represents the complicated relationship humans have with nature and life and death cycles. 

There's an interesting range of natural material here I could refer to for both the villain and hero.  I think these costume's also have a really creepy feel to them that might also come in useful for the villain's design.  In any case, I thought these designs were really cool and wanted to keep them somewhere!

(http://www.charlesfreger.com)

ARMSTREET

Armstreet is a medieval style clothing company.  I found their website whilst searching for reference for archery gear.  Not only are their products absolutely gorgeous but the photography is great, making this website fantastic for fantasy clothing reference.

(www.armstreet.com)

I also want to include this Feng Zhu lecture I watched about the importance of building your visual library.  He discusses how some artists seem to just be able to draw from instinct and points out this is likely because of having an extensive visual library.

Feng Zhu talks about looking to descriptive literature, travel, museums, nature and films/games in order to build a visual library.  I find drawing from imagination difficult so perhaps the solution is to do more actual studies of visuals I find in order to commit them to memory and, as a result, expand my own visual library.