As many people have said, if you work after finding enough references, you won't spend time looking for references later, which will save time, as well as texturing, so it's nice to be able to portray various things without being uniform.
I made a separate reference folder for the character, robot arm, and background, and then divided the modeling and texture folders to collect references.
When modeling and texturing, it was a little easier to find the reference I needed right away.