German:

i found your blog earlier this week and i love your art! i especially like the way you paint renaissance dress! 💕💕 if it's not rude to ask, where do you find your refs?

Thank you so much, I'm glad you like my art!! 🥺🥺💜

And don't worry, your ask is not rude, on the contrary! I'm more than happy to help - even if I want to specify now that I'm not at all an expert in historical fashion, so please don't believe that the outfits I draw are always 100% historically accurate. Also, almost everything I know concerns Italian Renaissance, so if you need reference for, let's say, German Renaissance I'm afraid I will not be that helpful 😔

Anyway! What I do when I want to draw Renaissance clothes is to look at art history! Luckily the Renaissance is a time where a lot of portrait have been made, and sometimes even religious or pagan artworks can be of help!

For example, for Venice I would search for the portraits by Titian or Giovanni Bellini to start, or also for the paintings by Vittore Carpaccio (the "Storie di Sant'Orsola" cycle is GREAT for outfit references). The same goes for other territories, for example a good start for Florence would be Domenico Ghirlandaio, or for Mantua the "Camera degli Sposi" by Andrea Mantegna and so on for the other cities.

If you don't know that many artist (as is my case when I want to draw someone from a place outside of Italy) you can start researching by finding portraits of the governors of the territory that you want to target! For example, let's say that you want to put a character at the start of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, so you ask yourself (and you ask internet): who was the first Grand Duke? Cosimo I de Medici. Cool, do we have a portrait of him? The first one we find in wikipedia is by Bronzino. Has Bronzino made other portraits? Yes! And you already have some references.

Alternatively, you can look up who were the wife and children of Cosimo, and search for portraits of them.

Some disclaimers about this method are:

Mostly the people who had portraits of them made were noblemen and noblewoman, and they posed wearing their best outfits, so be careful if you want to take them as a reference for common people!

Many times religious or pagan paintings are set in renaissance times in terms of outfits, but they are still stories from another time and age, so I wouldn't be surprised if the artists took a few liberties with the clothes

Then as now, fashion trends changed, so I would keep an eye on the dates in which the paintings were made

Some other references:

I feel some artist do a much better work than mine when researching historical clothes, for example @aph--lietuva draws amazing clothes! If you have instagram, I love the work of toscasam, who always puts a great care in researching the clothes of her characters!

I'll also leave some photos from a book I have at home, but please consider:

These are all references took from paintings, so all the disclaimers I listed above still stand;

I found this book in a vintage shop and it has been printed in 1959, so I’m sure you will find much more nuanced modern publications out there;

The captions are in Italian, but I'll leave them here anyway because the years of the clothes are still understandable

Italian Renaissance:

German:

Spanish:

Also, IF SOMEONE READING THIS POST HAS BETTER REFERENCES, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ADD INFORMATIONS IN THE REBLOGS! The more sources we have, the better!

Lastly, I would like to end this post by saying that despite the researches I'm more than willing to take some liberties when I draw. I'm an artist and not an historian, and whenever I feel like I'm limited by the lack of references I don't dwell too much on it and prioritize the completeness of the drawing by adding things from my mind, so don't rely too much on my art if you are looking for historical accuracy!

And that's all it comes to my mind about the topic. I hope I have been helpful (and clear, I know I still have some problems with the English language 🥲)! Thank you so much for the question and have a lovely day <3