About

Who

Kim (left) and Sanne (right)

There is no big corporation behind Line of Action. It's built and maintained by just one person, who often also has to work other jobs to make ends meet.

Hi! My name is Kim. I built this site back in 2008, and have taken it through multiple versions since then. I also practice on the site alongside you, and see the majority of your forum posts too.

Sometimes, my friend Sanne helps me with site moderation, helping me clean up spam and solve occasional arguments between users.

If you need to get in touch, the contact form goes directly to me.

What

Line of Action provides reference photos and practice tools for visual artists to hone their craft.

When it comes to human figure study, Line of Action is committed to expanding the inclusiveness of our model library, and rejecting calls to hide or exclude certain kinds of bodies.

All of our original features are - and will continue to be - provided for free; the only features behind a pay wall are ones that have been added after paid memberships were added to help support the site.

History

In college, I had lots of access to figure study classes with live models. After I graduated, I did not have the money to hire models on my own, and I would have had to travel a very long way to find a class to join.

So, I created a little slideshow script that mimicked the format of the figure drawing classes that I had had in school. The first version of it only existed on my personal computer, and utilized images I had found just by searching the internet.

Later, I was going on vacation with my family, and wanted to be able to practice while on the road. At that point, I turned the slideshow script into a website. Because I was putting it online and I realized there was a possibility that other people might eventually find it, I wrote to a number of photographers I knew or admired (mostly from the website DeviantArt, back then) and asked if they would be interested in donating photos to the tool. That way, I was only making use of images to which I had the rights. This resulted in a very strange patchwork of licensing agreements that sometimes even complicates what I can do with the site to this day, but it did get the site up and running quickly and cheaply.

Once it was online, I shared the URL with a friend or two from college, and a few online art friends as well... And then I came back from vacation to a giant bandwidth bill! It turned out that in a few weeks word of mouth had made the site very popular. And it only continued to grow from there.

Over the years, I have continued to work on the site, expanding its library with some photoshoots of our own, adding new features, entire new study tools like animals, hands, feet, and envoronments, and supporting artists all over the world.

Our AI policy

Line of Action is here to train human artists. Line of Action DOES NOT allow scraping or AI training using our photosets or user drawings. We will never provide AI generated reference images; only photographs of real people and things. We do not want to see AI art uploaded to user sketchbooks, either.

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