I was lucky enough to get the majority of my primary research and references collected before the lockdown began. Foliage is a big part of my project, so I made the most of the park that I live next to. Lighting also plays a big role, so I set up a tent and a made a fire – essentially built my own campsite in my garden – to collect accurate natural lighting reference at different times of the day.

Overall, I really love collecting reference. It pushes you to look at mundane things from a different light. It always blows my mind how artists can take a photo of a bug and use it as reference for the head, skin texture, colour palette, etc of a huge creature in a movie. If I had to change anything about this section of the project it would be to get some better equipment or to have taken pictures in weather/lighting better suited to my scenes. That way, I would have had more accurate lighting and colour reference. As for equipment, my camera is not very high quality and a lot of my pictures were blurred or the colour didn’t come out all that nice.

Below is a list of potential places I could visit to collect primary reference;

Garden Center – Garden Centers have tons of well cared for plants that I could use for texture reference. Not only that but a much larger variety of plants as well. So I won’t be tied down to the small variety of unkempt plants at Beechwood Park. The Garden Centre I’d specifically want to visit would be Blue Diamond at Cardiff. The shop has different sections/islands set up to show the plant in its natural habitat and plants that go with it. Those would make for great environment reference as well as be useful for making colour palettes. Those sections/islands are set up to be eye-catching and sell the plants, so obviously, the colours are going to be pleasing to the eye.

Go Outdoors – Go Outdoors stores have an enormous section dedicated to tents. The outside section is filled with already set up tents for customers to try out and have a look inside. I only have a pop-up tent at home, but I think a TP/triangular tent would look better in my scene. I could actually find and take pictures of one of the example tents that fits the aesthetic I’m looking for. Not to mention, I could get plenty of material reference from the different tent makes. However, I wouldn’t be able to get much lighting reference other than day/midday. So I’d have to come up with another way to get my ‘silhouette inside the tent’ reference.

Primary Resources/Reference Collected During the Project:

Beechwood Park –

Pop-up Tent –

My Dog –

My Garden –