It took a bit for me. Around the time I started drawing my comic, which was in 2018, I was trying to find a more cartoonish style to work in since all I drew in was an anime/manga. My inspirations at the time were cartoons from the early 2000s like Danny Phantom and Powerpuff girls. However, after I completed my first chapter, I realized that cartoony style really wouldn't work well for the genre I'm going which was action. I thought that the character designs read too stiff and wouldn't be easy to put into action poses. So I took some time in my sketchbook to rework the style to be a little less cartoonish but enough so that if someone read the comic it would feel like they're still watching a 2000s cartoon show. Since then, I taken some inspiration from artists I follow on instagram to artist whose comics I've subbed to here on Tapas.

Honestly for me it just came through grinding my art skills for years. I draw almost every day, and have been for going on 20 years.

I didn't see a marked improvement until the last 2 years. I can officially say, I have a definite style now. But that didn't begin, until I tried to really double my efforts and just draw draw draw draw even more, and experiment with other styles (Namely Pixel-Art)
Honestly though...it wasn't just the experimenting. It was actually starting my comic, and running with it, even though I was worried I wasn't good enough.

(This pile is two years worth of traditional sketches, all done on my lunch break at work)

IMG_20200915_112327~2.jpg2448x1352 526 KB

It just kind of started happening, I guess? I really only draw in like... 3 ways? Which is like, a more exaggerated classical style I use for some comics, my usual style, and a sharper more detailed style I use for more actiony things. I have a pretty close connection with these characters in my main comic, so I guess using the style that was the most natural for me to use was a no-brainer.

For years I went with a kind of "anime" art style. Kind of cute and cheerful .
Eventually I decided to grind my art skills, and studying anatomy and everything fancy like that. Along the way I noticed that the anime art style wouldn't work for the kind of story I wanted to convey with my comic. So I started gravitating towards making more semi-realistic work. Which I think I eventually reached. Alongside this I kind of try to make it look somewhat like a traditional painting .

I say it's more when you feel that you hit your artstyle. That and when you are drawing in that style for awhile, even when it improves. It took me awhile until I finally decided to go less anime and more realistic/naturalistic, hitting a middle ground for semi-realism. I improved upon it since then.

I still feel like i just cant stick with a style, it keeps changing. Ive watched anime and read manga for as long as i can remember so of course ive been inspired by it in my early years, but mostly Im very inspired by cartoons and animated series like kim possible, simple style, strong lines.
I thought i had found my style when i studied pen and paper style 2D animation some years ago, i really was comfortable with how i drew but lately my style have changed again and i guess its inevitable that it do and i have no real control over it so im trying to just go with it.
even tho looking at some older art makes me wonder why i cant draw like that again and enjoy it as much

I personally think that you don't 'find' a style, it always existed in the first place. A style is a set of rules which you follow to achieve an aesthetic. With that being said, you can have multiple styles. But, when you draw, your technical application of skills will define your style. How you draw lines, how you shade, how you depict light. Yes, this can be influenced by other people's styles you like, such as anime, realism, and etc... but that just influences how you choose to portray those skills in application. When my style surfaced, it came when I began to be confident in my skills, and found what techniques worked best for me. Everything you learn is synonymous with your style. Just like learning never stops, so does your style keep changing. But, with that aside, I found mine after many years of grinding my drawing skills, and experimenting with techniques and medias. My experimentation phase was most insightful in the development of my style and aesthetic that I draw in.

edit: grammar

Its very simple for me, I took one one of my older art styles, rendered way less that I do in my illustrations and there we go. XD

It's mostly just the style I've developed over the years of drawing, but I also decided to use a very western comic-type line art style that I hadn't done before. It's just a style I think looks rad and that's why I wanted to learn how to draw like that!

I experimented with pre-existing different styles, some that I liked and some that I didn't. I of course did some life-drawing but that hasn't clicked for me. I try to combine both Manga and Franco-Belgium comic art styles together with my own mixed in. The result, I find, is something I can truly uniquely call my own.

Some unsolicited advice that helped me improve much fast was to experiment with a different art style, even one's I didn't particularly had a fondness for. By doing so I found techniques of drawing things a certain way that made it easier. Then I modified it so it's easier for my personally.

A few years back when i decide to make my webcomic, I wasn't thought of it yet. But when i started to look on the tone of the story, the countryside setting, and imagine, that moment comes when i remembered this half-way ink doddle i drew. It captures something i would like to have in my comic. Therefore i have a direction...

I decided to go for a more texture focus, loosely line style that resembles a quick ink sketch (the style usually for nature landscapes). Of course I draw traditionally. So I did some practices with my fineliners & also try several brands of ink pens. Soon I kind of nailed down the "aesthetic".

ink_prac2.png904x420 92.1 KB

Traditional inking just have that organic look that's hard to emulate digitally. A lot the 'effects' comes down to pen choices. By the way, sketchy style is more forgiving than clean linearts. It can hide some of your mistakes and still look good.

As for the artstyle of my characters, I revised my old artstyle of which have flatter limbs and body, then mixed with cartoon & my current artstyle. My furry anthro characters are more Asian "kemono" looking. And they mostly have 5~6.5 head-body proportions (realistic enough to handle drama/action scenes, but cartoon enough not to look like Cats the movie) Sometimes they will look a bit on the edge of uncanny valley (especially on closeups), that I will keep in check.

When I start any comic, I always try to decide on what the style is going to be for that specific comic, so some previous ones I've done look like:

ABOVE_CLOUDS0001.jpg544x757 94.6 KB

OR

Vampire_short_1_TB.jpg1299x1772 576 KB

Like you can generally recognise certain consistent features typical of my work, but every comic I do might have a different approach with the details of the inking tool, the colour palette or toning style etc.

With Errant, one of my first decisions was that the basis of my colour palette would be the colours used in pre-digital colour comics:

I also wanted to draw something with a more manga-esque feel because I'd been doing less manga work for commissions for years at the time and it was nice to return to my "natural" style for fun.

I also considered using a finer, more sketchy kinda inking style and darker, weirder colours, as well as using very visible patterns in the backgrounds but I wasn't feeling the early style test. It was drawing a lot of attention to itself and didn't match the bold tone of the comic:

d81553d520164000513523ef7c348456.jpg1484x924 807 KB

I decided I wanted to try a really strong, stylised edge highlight like Enter the Spiderverse or Persona 5, which turned out to be a really handy way to add "shading" because I just need to whizz around some edges and I can choose the colour for the edge highlight to easily tweak the tone of my "lighting" in a scene.
To make it faster to make pages, I decided that backgrounds should have washy kinda colouring, nothing too neat. The scenery in Errant always has a washed out look, it tends to look like it's either raining or about to rain due to the alternate universe British setting.
Over time, the style shifted more and more towards a less scruffy indie look like the early pages and more towards a smoother, more shounen manga look, and that's how you end up with....

chapter1_10.jpg940x1412 502 KB

For the most part my style grew organically from the works that resonated with me. Maybe a half conscious and half unconscious thing. A half attempt at imitation and a building of several different influences from disparate places.

Also, when tackling different works I tend to bend one way or another merely by "seeing" the work differently in my head.

To sum it up, I don't think about it. My collection and research is done unconsciously through looking, reading and (not as often as I'd like) drawing from life. Life also tends to be an unconscious reference point too as I would look at stuff around me and picture how they may be drawn.

Style I feel is best not thought about. Only the work and your own feelings. Through the works tone you find the style. And the works tone is a far more accurate signifier of the authors identity then trying to nail down some kind brandable style.

I got my comic style out of knowing I'd have to crank out pages. I wanted to do a style that was quicker than my usual, but not simplified and still felt like "me".
The actual style itself is pretty much the same as my usual semi-realism style. But I decided to go with cel shading because it made color a lot more easier than worrying about soft and hard shadows and other lighting effects.

But my pages have been quite messy and scribbly almost. I think I need to clean them up.

For me it was mostly trial and error. I draw my comics in my own artstyle so the art improves over the course of the series.

Mine is probably the most anime you can get, but there are some differences that are subtle to mine (I think). I.E. hair not being flowy and natural, large head hair amount, ummm... hard to really gauge on other subtleties on my own art. But I know for sure that my lighting and shading are far different from basic anime art. I can safely say that the lighting pops.

I found it by drawing A LOT, I was somewhat quick to find it through a lot of experimenting with different tools and such.
Here's an example.

I find the more you draw the more your 'style' starts to develop. Though even then I don't think it ever really stops changing.

Mines all over the shop, but I'm happy my more recent pages (for now) lol!

I think it's probably more a Graphic Novel than a comic too. I come from an illustration background so used to creating one image rather than anything sequential - but I'm still going for it!

I tried to learn from my favorite artists, more or less.

As a kid, I used to be a huge fan of W.i.t.c.h. comics and my dream was to work on the series as an artist myself once I'd grow up, so I started to imitate Alessandro Barbucci's style as much as I could later on, though, I figured that it might be a good idea to learn to differentiate my style a little, so I started to add some variations: noses in particular were the first thing I started to work on, because W.i.t.c.h. characters had a very specific shape that made them instantly recognizable and wasn't really seen in any other comic that I knew.

Later on, I fell in love the works of Paolo Barbieri, Victoria Francés and Luis Royo, so I decided to go a little more towards the realistic route. Ended up drawing in full blown photorealism for a couple of years, but I knew that it wouldn't have been very feasible for a comic, so I tried my best to simplify.

I loved Wendigo's style in Cybersteel1 and I would have loved to achieve a similar result, but my digital coloring skills are nowhere near as good, so I decided to go the traditional route. Lately I'm trying to switch to digital because it's cheaper, but I intend to keep the general look of the comic still as close as I can to traditional art, 'cos I feel that's what works best for me