http://www.gnomonschool.com/master/matte-painting.html?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=450&width=640 Is another concept artist who use photo ref in his digital paintings. Having watched his videos though, he gets basic form, composition, and concept through pencil sketches, and then uses photo's for colour palette, as…
A friend of mine who enjoys digital painting recently produced incredible works of almost photoreal quality. He really does draw well, so although I was surprised at his leap in skill, I didn't suspect anything. Not until someone else let me know in secret that he'd been painting over stuff. And that stinks of…
In production, I'm all for it. From an environment artist's perspective, its all about figuring out a scene before you spend the expensive art time on it, so it is only used as a conceptualizing tool anyway. It's an awesome time saver. For a portfolio, not so much. I remember seeing someone's portfolio a while back, and…
I don't see any problem with re-using anything that's legally available for you to use in your artwork. Smart re-use of textures and models can be a huge time saver in a production environment. I've met a few very highly regarded professional concept artists in person and seen how they work, you'd be surprised by how they…
It kind of depends... what's the artist's intent? Are they claiming they did it from scratch? Would they be able to do amazing work on their own, but are simply using the resources available to them to save time? Where I work (ArenaNet) some, not all, of our concept artists use photos to block out their scenes or to come…