This is for
livinaphantasie. I was going to respond to their latest status but it was getting pretty long and I figured maybe lots of people could benefit from this so I decided to do a journal.
To start, I guess the point of this journal is to hopefully to help out artists who feel like they're having trouble making their art their own or don't like how they draw. I feel like a good starting point is outlining the difference in drawing and coloring style. I feel like those are pretty different. I feel like coloring, while there are different styles to do it in, is still primarily technical skill once you know what look you're going for. In terms of how you actually draw and portray things, that's more natural. And I've heard artists say that most times by trying to forcefully develop a style, you're usually repressing your natural style. Thinking about it, how I draw came as a product of a bunch of artists who inspired me as I was developing. So here's a summary of how my personal style developed starting from when I actively started trying to be a better artist.
-Middle School: started drawing based on manga girl tutorials. Always front facing arms behind back and also not all that great?? Didn't really look like anime, just the same person with different clothes and hair. ONLY DREW GIRLS. Also drew hair with pretty much all straight lines. Everything was so pointy...
-Freshman in High School: Met my friend Savannah who also drew. I noticed how she drew hair with a series of curved lines and started adapting that into my own art. There was also a point where I was drawing every hair individually for a while..for some reason. Art was still pretty bad like really anatomically incorrect. The legs were always way too long..like shoujo legs but worse.
-Still High School: Started reading webcomics, which was mostly Homestuck. Also Paranatural and Monsterkind. My art started being inspired by Ikimaru, a popular Homestuck artist. I also started using shapes like varying triangles for noses which came from Monsterkind. Art is also starting to get rounder.
Senior Year High School: This is the year I got my drawing tablet. My coloring is inspired a lot by Shelby Cragg but isn't even close to her level.
Freshman Year College: Undertale comes out so I stop drawing Homestuck 24/7 and start drawing Undertale 24/7 lol. Still drawing with lineart. At some point I switched over to lineless, though all the shading was done with various layer effects.
So the comparison between freshman year high school and freshman year college:
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~2011/2012==>Aug 2015==>Nov 2015==>Feb 2016
From about my second semester in college to present day I started experimenting with going lineless/limited lines. Used at least 5 layers of overlay/addition for everything.
Dec 2015 ==> Jan 2016
Sense of color is starting to get better, but I'm near positive that in the second frisk one I just made everything red and hit color on the layer mode or something. But honestly?? It looks good and if I had chosen to I could've developed that particular coloring style. Note that for the last for drawings, for the coloring (in the posing dramatically frisk one just the lighting) I used the same brush. And personally!! I think it was good for me, because I ended up shading without the airbrush and I feel like that was a good move in learning how to do softer shading vs hard shading.
I then started to delve into how I would draw now, the first attempt of which looks godawful:
March 2016
We don't talk about this one guys okay?? I still use that same brush (mainly hair/frisk's face) but also have started using this like textur-y brush (clothes/the glowy lights). Needless to say I step away from that for a while. Notice how while I'm mainly focusing on coloring now, you can still see my drawing style developing. It's not really changing too much--just becoming more refined.
I start using that textured brush and the new main blender on all my paintings and start trying to maintain the cartoon-y style that actually works with how I draw instead of the first attempt which was almost trying to mesh in realism too hard and too badly.
April 2016 (both)
I was gonna make a whole series of battle stuff like this but stopped at these two. Personally I feel like how I started to paint depended a lot on what brush I was using. How I was coloring here was another coloring style that like before, I could've gone on to develop in a different direction than I did. Or even just kept coloring like that.
And also, the time scales between some of these show a huge jump in a short amount of time. And I always tell people this but I always felt like I took a jump every time I started experimenting.
And actually going to where I am today I think I took a step back first from this last stuff. And I started gearing towards it after I started following WalkingMelonsAAA's things, and she's still a huge inspiration to me. So note also that..your style is pretty effected by who you're inspired by!!
Going towards that led me to switch back to mainly using that SAME OLD BRUSH and stuff like this:
May 2016
July 2016
Oct 2016
Honestly?? I think the previous set of images are 400% better than these. I would say the biggest improvement is that I'm coming up and using colors all on my own now, without the use of any layer adjustment stuff. I cut down on that big too in the previous set, but I think it was still there minorly. Also there's nothing wrong with overlay layers/addition layers/etc! I was personally just really dependent on them for anything colorwise. It was like drawing with the original colors and then using them to edit them instead of every actually thinking about how color should work.
(Still haven't dropped using a shape nose!)
AND THEN FINALLY I realized that using just my same old trusty brush wasn't enough and started using the airbrush:
I also started at some point with using a textured oil pastel like brush to do all the initial laying down of color, as well as of the the outlines. I actually used only that brush for my most recent Bendy pic:
Because using something with a harder edge for the color laydown is good for when I'm figuring out how I want things to be shaded.
And I still use my old trusty brush!! I just can't get the softer shading for stuff that I was looking for with it. So sometimes the process is laying down all the color like in bendy, blending some with the trusty brush, and then airbrushing to smooth it over.
And now my painting is like the above, but like with the drawing style, just becoming more fine tuned. A lot of which came with me highlighting and outlining things more. Sometimes I wonder if I should revert back to when I didn't do it to the same extent! Another part of fine tuning was realizing that I...just don't like the airbrush at times. Everything seemed too smooth, so I started using a custom one I made that had more of a texture to it! So the end game, from freshman year highschool to present is really like:
~2011-2012 Aug 2017
Thank you to all who stuck it out to the end! In the end, I guess the moral in that finding your own style is a lot of being inspired by other people, and experimenting with different ways to do stuff! And then just letting that develop naturally.
I still like to experiment with new brushes! I wish I wasn't at college right now I have all my old sketchbooks at home for more cringy art. I have all my old digital files so it's easier to show the here-now process on coloring since it's available.
And if you're ever feeling bad about your art, remember my cringy homestuck art. With the long shoujo legs and terrible everything. Because where you start isn't where you end! And your art goals shouldn't be to be like a certain artist, because you'll always feel like you're in their shadow. The only artist you should want to be better than is yourself! And you can get there!! Every piece is a learning experience for the next and if I can go from bad, BAD art to hella good art then so can you.