The 50 best-selling Refimages reference packs, grouped by job: figure libraries, daily practice, action, hands, lighting, turnarounds and tools.
You have twenty tabs open. Every one of them is a reference pack with a big number in the title, a model you have never heard of, and a price somewhere between nothing and twenty dollars. Nothing on the page tells you which of them is for the problem you actually have, which is that your seated figures fall over and you cannot draw a convincing hand. So you close all twenty tabs and go back to scrolling for free images, which is how most of these decisions actually end.
This is an attempt to fix that for our own catalogue. Below are the fifty best-selling packs, grouped by the job an artist is doing rather than by rank, because rank is close to useless when you are shopping. Someone who needs hands needs hands. But before any of it is useful, you need to know what “best-selling” means here, because on its own it would mislead you.
These are Gumroad transaction counts. A free download counts as one transaction, exactly the same as a twelve-dollar purchase. Eight of the fifty entries are priced at zero, and they take the top three places and six of the top ten. A list whose number one entry is free is not a list of what people value most; it is a list of what moved. Both facts are interesting, but they are different facts, so treat the free entries and the paid entries as two separate rankings and read them that way.
The second caveat matters just as much. Eight of the fifty are not photo reference at all. Seven are brush and custom-shape sets for digital painting, most of them explicitly for Photoshop, and one is a holiday discount offer rather than a product. They sell well because they are useful, but if you came here for pose reference and you buy a brush pack by accident, that is our fault for putting them on the same list. They are quarantined in their own section near the bottom, and nothing in the reference sections is a tool.
A few titles also carry marketing debris — coupon codes, a typo, a fire emoji, the word BONUS in brackets. I use the clean names in prose. The links point at the real products.
This is the part worth reading even if you buy nothing. Fifty products with real numbers attached is a small but honest sample of what artists spend money on, and the pattern is not what a marketer would predict.
Published 2026-09-06 on the Refimages blog.