By drawing from reference you usually have your reference image somewhere on your screen. If you don't have a second screen, you have it somehow next to the Sketchbook Window or (and that's usual way) on a layer in Sketchbook. But this is pretty unhandy, cause you need your space on the layer for drawing/painting of course. I know you can do that better like some others do.
- My simple suggestion would be to provide a new layer type, let's say reference layer. This reference layers can be placed outside of the canvas but still being visible all the time.
- Extension: On top of this reference layer system you can safe and load a set of references as separate file. So this references are not part of the project file (PSD, tiff etc.).
I would love to see something like in near future!
This two examples may be one of the best and probably the easiest way to do this.