How to Improve Art, Really?

[foxnflames]

Ok so I FINALLY finished this yesterday. I use Procreate and for my characters I make palettes. After all my layers I use to get my outline, I ink them out then layer up with airbrush. I saw someone do it on Pinterest and tried it out. I’m still learning A LOT and playing around with brushes but right now I’m really liking airbrush.
So to carve out the features I’ll make the brush as small as possible and do the nose and focus on the lights and shadows to get it how I want. Like my comment earlier, the most subtle highlight can make a lot of depth. And to make it look more realistic? Dimensional? Some other third word? I ever so slightly lighten or darken the color I’m using and blend them to make subtle gradients.
For the eyes and lips I use pencil and charcoal brushes, blending and throwing in some highlights where needed.
Hair is just the hair brush tool and I went back over some strands to make it look like the light was hitting it 🤷🏽‍♀️
But @Inspector_Spinda your art is good as is and has personality. It’s consistent from character to character and your proportions are good. (And I love Hugh’s shirt). But I get about wanting to elevate and improve but you have to see what that means for you and your story. Beyond that, learn and study shadows and and “mimic” how you see it done on reference photos until you can truly understand it yourself, which will take time.
My personal method is staring at something I want to emulate until it just clicks. May take 5 minutes, make take a week

Sorry this is long, just wanted to pop in with some more inspiration

[TheGentleArtist]

A cool neat trick is sometimes redraw what you drew. This helps to see what mistakes there are that you didn't see beforehand and can iron them out. Improving in light and shading helps a ton with dimension; a good tip to remember is "Light doesn't just stop, it keeps going." This helps to avoid having a block of shade and draw it actually wrapping around an object; metals, I think, are an exception.

[Rhonder]

I think your style is really cool, but definitely see where you're coming from with the flatness! After looking between your DA and inspiration examples, here are some things I would recommend playing around with/trying:

• Experiment around with dynamic poses and varying camera angles. One thing that I think lends itself to lack of dimension and flatness in a lot of your work is that many many of your drawings are done in either front-on or profile view. Those sorts of shots by nature are challenging to convey volume with because they're light on perspective. Even some of your would-be 3/4 views are basically straight-on shots with only the head tilted (such as the Hugh and Nicky character turn arounds, where as something like the drawing of Hailey is more of a proper 3/4 body angle). Not that every single pose has to be super dynamic of course (and I probably float too much to the other side- leaning on 3/4 views as a crutch xD) but when you draw characters and objects in angles where you see more than 1 plane of them (i.e. back and side or side and front) then you'll be forced to render out the volume a bit more The same also goes for variable camera angles too, such as bird's eye or worm eye views, rotating the view, etc.

• Try overlapping elements and objects more to create a feeling of depth. Something I see in almost every example posted in the OP as inspiration is that they make use of layering objects, limbs, etc. to get that sense of volume. The Pokemon picture, for example, doesn't have particularly intense linework or shading even, but you still get that sense of it being a dynamic piece with how all of the arms and legs are overlapping different parts of the characters, and the characters overlapping one-another.

• Experiment with different brushes and techniques. I saw in one reply that upping the coloring game is something you were particularly interested in, and for that I would simply suggest playing around with different tools you haven't tried out before. You have a good sense of defining volume effectively with shade (as can be seen across pretty much all of your pieces) but tend to keep it really minimal and also almost always use just hard edge brushes. One piece that stood out to me was this one though where you added some blending in certain areas:

https://www.deviantart.com/inspector-spinda/art/Unwanted-Rider-842387227

Stuff like that can be really powerful and give a cool look if you continue to play around with it and experiment My favorite discovery of last year was watercolor brushes: coming from a marker background before transitioning into digital art, I really love the look that those brushes give both when quickly coloring up a sketch as well as for shading, so I've been playing aroundn with those a lot more, especially after i found myself somewhat unsatisfied with just using the basic round hard brush for stuff like that.

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Other than that, just like others have said - practice but especially pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone as much as possible is a good way to go

[Bokyongyo]

Like what others have said prior I would really look into the works of people you admire and to study what makes their art stand out to you.

I really like your style but I understand as a creator you could feel like you want something more out of your art.

Usually what I do is find not only artists I like but also those whom have a style similar to my own and study how their pieces works.

[WisdomChimp]

If i was you i'd start by practicing head design, add mouths after you got the hang of things, ears, and then eyes. Then start on expressions. Try some hair. And finally color for inbetween as well as on the lines.

[Hazumirein]

1.) The simple answer to your question is: Draw a lot. Not like, 24/7, but a lot. Having a comic is actually a huge help with that, and you will improve over time without even realizing it until you look back at your older stuff.

2.) Impostor syndrome is a real thing and no matter how good you get, you're always going to judge your own work wayyyy more harshly than you do other people's, so just be prepared for that.

3.) As for your art specifically; it really isn't bad at all, you have a strong style and your characters are all very distinct from one another, though I can see why you'd want to move in the direction of some of the examples you posted. Best thing to do is to study artists you like, try replicating some of their drawings or their style to really break down what exactly they're doing that makes it look good (obviously, don't post this stuff as original work). The other best thing to do is use photo reference as much as possible. If you think you know what something looks like--trust me, you don't; look it up. If you're currently not using it much, starting to use reference regularly is a pretty good formula for very quick, noticeable improvement.

[Jenny-Toons]

Experiment.

Some of my best art (whether it's from 2020 or older) has been the art where I said "screw it" and decided to test something out.

Maybe it was a new shading trick I saw on Twitter.

Maybe I wanted to use a different pen and see how it would look.

Or maybe I went "Ok, so I usually draw hair this way. What if I did it another way?"

I went through a phrase where I did scratchy shading:

I went through a phrase where I wanted to try and mimic 90s anime:

I tested out with different pens:

Now I'm practicing with curly hair:

Just play around with details. If you see something you'd like to change, try out different ways to change it.