Reference Photos
I persuaded my granddaughter to pose for reference photos (by persuade, I mean that I paid her). The illustration was supposed to be of a boy, but at this young age it is easy enough to make a girl look like a boy and vice versa.

To prepare for this crude photo shoot, I bought a hat and a pair of boy's shoes to use as props, while my granddaughter provided the shirt, pants and bike. Dressed in this makeshift farm-boy outfit, my granddaughter took her position on the bike, which was lit from above and to the right by the sun, and assumes a pose similar to the client's concept layout. Using a Fuji s602 digital camera, I took several shots, changing the pose of the model slightly with each shot.

Back at the studio, I loaded the photos on my computer and pick the ones that worked best. Then, using Photoshop—and this is one of my favorite uses of Photoshop—I altered the original photos to more closely fit my vision of the final illustration. It didn't matter that the alterations were blatantly noticeable, since the photos were used only as a guide for making a drawing. I altered 3 or 4 photos using different poses, props, and angles for each, and printed them out to use as reference. I still had to do a lot of drawing from imagination, but using the altered photos as a staring point saved a lot of time.