Reference Images

smceccarelli

One super precious reference is the Muybridge plates - some of them feature children too. The quality of the images reflects the time they were shot (early 1900), but it´s still a go-to reference, especially for animators.

Muybridge plates

There is also a series of super old books of reference for illustrators (think pre-internet age), one of of which is dedicated to children. The photo quality is not excellent, but some of these are pretty unique:

Reference for Illustrator Books

You can find them second hand via Amazon or other sources.

And finally there is a series of books on reference for Manga in Japanese called Posefile. They are very expensive though, I never managed to get hold of one. I’m not sure there is one with children, but they look pretty cool nevertheless.

posefile

Chip Valecek

Might not be kids but this is a huge reference for me to us. You might be able to find the pose you are looking for and adjust the proportions. https://www.deviantart.com/pose-emporium/gallery/

TessaW

This might be too time consuming and it's not an immediate solution if you have a specific pose in mind, but I've always found that screen capturing videos to be a useful resource. Find a video that heavily features children, and start screen capturing. You'll typically get a wide range of poses and awesome facial expressions from one movie. There's probably programs out there that allow you to do this easily. Then you start building a library of great facial expression and kids in action, that will come in handy down the line.

Here's 2 examples from my personal collection.

robgale

@tessaw Ooh nice. I like this idea of scouring movies for good reference like this. I need to spend more time gathering and organizing reference. @Gary-Wilkinson If you do go this route of looking in movies, you can look at https://movie-screencaps.com/ which I think could be easier / faster than trying to screengrab directly from video. Not strictly children's movies, but there are a lot of movies on there.

TessaW

@robgale Omg, that site is amazing!

robgale

@tessaw Isn't it!? I don't know how it's cool with the studios, but they seem to be legit and sticking around.

MF James

@robgale Wow! Who has time to do a website like that? ..... I'm glad someone does. It's great.
But you do need to see the films before to know what you can get out of them. Very useful indeed.
It's in my bookmarks forever more

robgale

@mf-james I know! I am constantly amazed at what people find the time to DO on the internets. Glad you found it useful!

Gary Wilkinson

Thank you so much for everyone's replies and help. @smceccarelli I managed to find a couple of those posefile books for pretty cheap (perks of living in Japan) so thank you for letting me know about those and the other books!

@robgale @TessaW Great idea about using movies as reference, and that website is a gem!

Julia

Hello Gary,

In addition, for a more modern look, you can use sites providing photos free of right such as :
https://www.pexels.com/search/children/
https://stocksnap.io/search/children
https://unsplash.com/search/photos/children

not perfect but adding variety to your resources

Show us what you create! See if you surpass Carl Larsson!
https://goo.gl/images/BRb8Re

Sas

@robgale Oh whoa! That's an awesome website! Thank you so much for sharing that! Perspective studies, here I come!!!

Chip Valecek

Inline with what @robgale posted, here is a site with all cartoon screengrabs: https://animationscreencaps.com/

StudioLooong

@chip-valecek wow, this site is great!

robgale

@sas Cool! Post your studies! I would love to see how other people use these sites for studying.

Sas

@robgale I think it will be more try to copy environmental scenes to understand it better