My view entering the Ambassador Bridge to Canada!

Hello, dear readers – I am writing to you today from beautiful Montreal, after a much-less-beautiful 16 hour drive! I’m from down south originally, so when I moved to Chicago, Canada seemed enticingly close—and this summer, my faithful sidekick (ok, roommate) and I have made the trip. So why do I keep taking pictures of streetlights and trash cans? You’ll have to read more to find out!

While there is absolutely no professional or productive reason for this trip (besides, perhaps, keeping me sane enough to complete my thesis year), little bits of Montreal will probably pop up in my work for years to come, whether they’re recognizable or not. I am a serial reference-photo-taker, and whenever I’m in a new place, I fill my phone not only with pictures of myself in front of just about everything photographable (sorry, Facebook friends) but also with hundreds of mundane street shots and architecture details. The parking meters here are different to any I’ve ever seen, so they get snapped. The moulding on that building is half-decayed? Great, the next time I draw a building in disrepair, I’ll have something to go off of!

Drawing from life is an invaluable exercise in becoming great at drawing, but it just isn’t always possible—especially if I’m drawing a scene in Italy from all the way over in Chicago. Heck, sometimes I’m too lazy to even leave the house; here is a photo I snapped of a couple houses in my own neighborhood. I later combined architectural attributes of both houses to create a fictional mansion in my latest book.

Some Logan Square reference shots. Love me those witch-hat roofs.

I’m also a big fan of patterns: cobblestones in the street, damask on a dress I pass by in a shop window, the hand-painted decorations on the side of a boat, and even ultra-elaborate temple fare, like this one that I snapped in Thailand:

It’s important to get super-close-up shots of patterns, so that they’re easier to see and reference later!

But of course, it always ends up being pictures like the one below that I get the most use out of. Tons of power lines, street signs, cars and trucks, and all the other things that make city scenes believable.

A view on the street of Yecheon, the town I used to live in in Korea.

Gathering reference photos is not only a fun scavenger-hunt type thing to do on vacation, but it also helps to assuage some of that all-too-prevalent grad student “I can’t believe I’m not working on art right now” guilt. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go stroll down the Boulevard Saint-Laurent to rustle up some brunch. And hey, don’t look at me like that—it’s for my art!