I found a great source for reference and learning anatomy, the Loomis books. They can be downloaded from here:
Loomis booksFineart.sk is a great free resource for anatomy. They also have online versions of the loomis books.
Many use Poser for figuring out poses for their characters and also for reference. This is a great program, but there's a couple of free alternatives out there. One is the
DAZ|Studio, which is a light version of Poser. It is quite good, but the downside is that it only includes a lowres female character, other characters have to be bought. Another solution is
MakeHuman, there you can morph your character to male, female or fantasy, and ofcourse pose it. It is in alpha state yet, so much is not implemented, but for the use of refrence in a digital painting it works well. The model exports as obj, so it can be taken into any 3D program and rendered, or you can render it right from the program itself. To do that you have to install the free rendering engine
Aqsis, and it renders with shaders and a sub surface scattering skin shader, not bad!
3d.sk is a good source for photo reference, but one can also here use free photo sources instead, like
sxc.hu, or a cheap stock photo source like
istockphoto ($1 per photo).
Photo searches like google images can be also be used for finding refrences, but be aware that there is a copyright issue if you paint too similar.
