Tell me: Where do you get your drawing templates from?
Illustrators don't have it easy. Their clients often have very specific ideas about what they want to see, even if they don't know exactly what it will look like. This is especially challenging for, for example, Storyboard artists for commercials or feature films. The script might say something quite innocuous: "A wide shot of a typical, middle-class living room from the 1960s. A young woman in evening wear serves coffee..." And there's the problem: What did living rooms actually look like 50 years ago? What were shoe styles like around 1905?
Can you draw a pram from that era from memory?
Can you name one of today's modern three-wheeled strollers? Or hats? Stoves? Garden furniture? Even with Google, it's not easy to find the right one online.
Here's our tip: Get your hands on mail-order catalogs – while they're still available. They offer hundreds of pages of everything a commissioned artist could ever need to be able to draw, from underwear and toys to kettles, cleaning supplies, curtains, and of course, shoes.
Of course, the easiest way is to get the current catalogs – they'll even send them to you free of charge – but you can still find many older items secondhand. And before you know it, you'll have a richly stocked library with templates of just about everything imaginable.
So why work from memory when it's so much easier to find it in a catalog… (– which, incidentally, also applies to the drawing tool: you can find that in a catalog too, for example in ours. But that's not the point here.)