I been teaching myself how to draw for the past 5 years (heres some of my work https://x.com/jaks024 ).

Throughout this art journey, art references was essential. You gotta see what you are drawing to learn how to draw it. But the more references I used, the more annoying the process became. I ended up barely using references at all, which made the quality of my work worse.

In my art process, I would collect reference images from across the web (like Pinterest, Twitter, etc), but I would have no where to store it or manage it. Sure, I could store it in on my local disk, but then I'll need a app to manage and organize all the reference images. Then to use a reference board to organize the ideas for my artwork, I will need to use a different app for that. Then to share my references, I'll need to use another app for it. When I'm travelling and I want to draw, I'll need yet another app to access all my references. I hope you see where this is going.

Since I have a technical background, I been building refern (REFErences, Right, Now) on and off during my spare time for almost a year now to solve this problem. refern is an all-in-one art reference and artwork sharing platform that let you save, create, find, organize, moodboard, and share curated art references and artworks.

So now I can - Scroll on the web and save reference images while I scroll with just a click. - Organize all the images within the app through tags, collections, and folders. - Search all my images, collections, or reference board at once. - Save time labelling images since it all images are automatically labelled. - Find, save, and use other collections of references created by other users. - Reference board any of the reference images that I have in my library. - And most importantly, it is just a single app that I need to use. Since it's all online, I can access all my stuff from any device, and also share my stuff with friends with just a link.

Ever since refern got to a working state (about 6 months ago), I been using it whenever I'm drawing. And recently, I've added a new streak and timeline feature to keep myself drawing consistently by uploading my work and maintaining a streak everyday. Using refern has improved my artwork a lot (could also be just extra practice), but it has saved so much time and hassle when dealing with references.

Right now, I've finally got refern to a state that I'm pretty happy with. Of course there is still a lot of work to do, but I'm always open for feedback! Feel free to give it a try, or tell someone you know who might benefit from this!

my refern profile: https://my.refern.app/jaks024 demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLFo4PhW-kE