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Primary sources

Working directly from a primary source allows you to:

• Examine your subject from different angles and change your viewpoint.
• Experience objects, images, people or places in different lighting conditions and compositions.
• Look at things close up or from further away.
• Take your own reference photographs from angles and in conditions that reflect your interests.
• Revisit your source material during your development process.

Bear in mind that working with primary sources may limit your choices. Certain topics will make it very difficult to work from primary source.

Secondary sources

If your stimulus is a piece of music, media or literature, you are working from a secondary source.

Work based around a person or location that you could not actually visit would also rely on secondary sources.

Using secondary sources as your main visual stimulus can cause problems:

• Not being able to draw from life will limit your decisions on viewpoint, composition and lighting.
• You will be relying on images generated by others based on their creative choices rather than your own.
• You may find it very difficult to carry out effective development like changing compositional arrangements.

Using primary and secondary sources

It can be useful to work from both primary and secondary sources:

• You might decide to explore ideas about a social issue from a news article (secondary source) using locations, people or objects that you have access to (primary sources).
• You might use an artwork or textile design (secondary source) to help you create a background for a self-portrait or still life of real objects (primary sources)