You then have to make decisions on what details to include and which ones you can omit to depict its essence. When kids make their own images, they determine what is important. The evolution of a child's visual style comes from choosing which details need to be visualized. If you don't know how something looks, you have to look it up. The Internet, books, and CDs might not be a proper source of visuals, but all of them are fabulous for doing research.
Photographs are useful for researching what something looks like.
Drawings show the variety of ways something can be portrayed. And now I've seen a wombat, a little furry, rather cute marsupial with very sharp teeth. Creativity and Problem Solving Keep in mind that much of making art is problem-solving. Experience in making decisions strengthens individual personal expression. Besides what to draw, one must make many other decisions when creating computer art.