I just did a spurt of portfolio reviews (it’s fresh graduates season!) and a topic seemed to come up more than a few times, and that usually means it’s worth a Muddy Colors article. So here we go. I don’t want to make this sound like a “the kids don’t know X” or “back when I was in school we knew how to Y” kind of thing, but I think some old(er) school knowledge might help a growing problem. A growing problem of using search engines for image research.

Since I’ve been reviewing portfolios and commissioning illustrators (for 20ish years now) I have occasionally had to have a conversation with artists about their image research. Sometimes amusingly referred to as “Google-Fu“. The most glaring issue was most often reminding an artist — usually one fresh out of school — to not just use the first image of anything they found on Google Images. And to not just use one solitary image as reference. This protects an artist from not only copyright issues like the Shepard Fairey Obama poster drama, but it also forces you to make choices, combine, and remix your reference. Even shoot & incorporate your own with found reference. And that was good enough, really, for a while. Although you had to be careful what you were referencing, usually you could trust photos found online in general. And you could trust historical information as well. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. AI image generation has poisoned the open web, and it is very very hard to tell what is and isn’t legit reference. And while we can poke fun at extra teeth and fingers on early AI imagery, that’s becoming less and less of an issue. I find the issues with historical imagery much more concerning. As any history nerd who’s on the internet can tell you, social media and YouTube have been absolutely flooded by AI-generated historical images and videos that are not only obviously impossible (photos of Cleopatra, anyone?) to much more insidious misinformation. This is very concerning for any artists working in education or concept art.

So, if Google Image Search is a hot mess and it takes way too much work to get to anything you can trust, where do you go? Well, back before Google we collected a lot of hard copy reference. Artists were as much librarians as image makers. We all had to have libraries crowding us out of our studio space, and many of us hoarded flat files full of ephemera just waiting for that one perfect project that called for it. And if you didn’t have it, your friend artists might. And while great art reference books (especially the hundreds of Dover Pictures Image Books) are SO cheap or even free at every thrift store and Goodwill these days, and I think we should be returning to the skills of cultivating the perfect artist library again, sometimes we need things too fast for paper.

So here are a few categories of much more reliable (and higher-quality) reference images online for reference, research, and studying illustration masters of the past.

Stock Photography Sites

This is the easiest and fastest option. You can download pretty decent sized imagery from any stock house, and while it may be watermarked it’s still perfectly good for reference and research purposes. In ancient times there were no searchable websites. You used to have to CALL THEM and ask for SLIDES to be messengered over to whatever office you were working at. The horror! You’re lucky if they showed up next day and you got 25 slides to choose from. Or you had to go down and look at slides in person.
Here’s some tips:
—Sign up for  free account. You can save images and many sites will let you download un-watermarked or higher-resolution images just because you’re signed in.
—Once you have signed in, go turn off every option for AI imagery. Most sites have had to fence in their AI offerings because industries that rely on copyright protections insisted they must be able to search for imagery with AI images taken out. Yes, like book publishing. You’re welcome.
—If you are looking for documentary, real life imagery, then search with the “Editorial” or “Editorial Only” filters on. These images can only be used commercially for nonfiction purposes but again, you can use them for research and reference. Just remember the Shepherd Fairey rule. Don’t use one image exactly.
—Go beyond the big boys like Shutterstock and Getty and Adobe Stock. There are still a ton of very specific stock agencies out there specializing in all kinds of imagery. Sites like Trevillion specialize in imagery specifically made for book covers, and do not allow any AI in their library. Bridgeman specializes in fine art — they have access to just about every art museum’s collections. Mary Evans Picture Library specializes in historical ephemera. And you can search by original artist. (One of my faves). Tandem specializes in travel imagery. Etc. Etc. There’s stock agencies for everything. Instead of googling for an image, google for the stock house specializing in the type of imagery.

Educational Institution Image Libraries

Many universities and libraries host both very general and very specific image collections on their servers. You can find these by searching for “image collection, “image archive” or “university library” + topic, but look at the web hits, not the image hits. Many of these accounts are protected from web crawling search engines, but their archives can be accessed by a free account or a library card you probably already have. If not, get a library card already! Here’s some I’ve used recently:

New York Public Library Picture Collection — omg, the big daddy of all picture archives. In ye olden times these collections weren’t digitized, so you needed to go to the 42nd Street Main NYC Library and request topics IN PERSON and then pay for scans of anything you wanted to take with you. I burned months of my life to that building. The good thing is most of the images are in the public domain, so once you found them you could use them for free! Not all the collections are online, but 34,000 images are!

The US Library of Congress also has an incredible ephemera collection.

Museum Specific Sites — The Met, The Smithsonian, The Art Insititute of Chicago, and most major museums have a digital collection area on their site.

Duke University has a great picture archive with a specific area for advertising imagery. NYU also has an extensive collection, especially a great architecture library.

Auction Houses and Galleries

You know who’s great at collecting and storing tons of high-quality imagery? Folks that make money off selling art. And while Museum Collections can get pretty specific, it doesn’t hold a candle to how specific galleries can get. Just be warned that searching live auctions can be dangerous for your wallet! Here’s some faves for specifically illustration work:

Swann Galleries — absolutely fabulous resource, especially for posters and illustration history. Right now they have a live general illustration auction that has a lot of animation and cartooning materials. But the treasure trove is their archive of past auctions. Their catalogs are always well researched and the background info on pieces can be very deep. They also have photography, fine art, book, and collectible auctions to look through. This article on understanding marks on old illustration originals is fantastic, especially if you’ve only ever worked in the digital age.

Heritage Auctions — many folks on Muddy Colors have mentioned Heritage Auctions before, because they often have auctions specifically for Science Fiction & Fantasy Art. Like this one.

The Illustrated Gallery — another good site for illustration history. Look at all these Leyendeckers!

Don’t forget that auction and gallery sites are a good resource to figure out your art pricing as well.

Public Domain Resources

Some sites are not quite stock agencies and aren’t attached to institutions, but they collect and/or highlight what work is in the public domain and often have searchable databases that can often reach into the institutional collections mentioned above.

The Public Domain Archive is the database of the Public Domain Review and their newsletter is fantastic, you should sign up for it, it’s one of the best emails that shows up in my inbox. All of the images in this post were found via their “Infinite View” portal, which is definitely a form of meditation for me.

Old Book Illustrations is smaller and Patreon-driven but they keep a nice collection.

 

Ok, that’s all my picture research secrets for now. Don’t blame me for the internet hole you fall down!