Let's talk about art styles

[Leyelle]

I'm with you, I know my art has a lot of room for improvement in accuracy, rendering, coloring, anatomy, lighting, shadows, etc, but I do genuinely like my art style, it feels like it suits me well

[kyupol]

I love it but I think it could be leveled up some more. The way I draw them is exactly how I picture them in my brain

[ThunderChicken]

My art style has definitely evolved over the years. Around 90-91, when I was a senior in high school, it was heavily influenced by the Simpsons, as you can tell here:

I didn't like copying the Simpsons style though, and headed off in a new direction:

And another one

When I started drawing again in 2022 I tried to pick up my old early 90's style again:

But I didn't like it. I knew I could do better, especially with the new drawing hardware and software, so I redid those characters:

As time passed and i got some practice in (and also learned the software better) my style evolved to be more realistic, but I still kept "cartoon eyes" and eyebrows for Wild Nights, Hot and Crazy days:

When I started Finding Daecon's Way I honed the realistic look but lost the cartoon eyes:

Then I decided to stop fighting my natural limitations (I have a medical condition that causes shaky hands, making drawing smooth lines very difficult). Here you can see a good example of the shaky hands: Just look at the lines on that horse's legs:

And so I started using a more sketch-like style. I can easily do short strokes, so using many short strokes to get my shapes works. More important, though, is that I actually prefer the look:

Since I adopted this method I have been further refining the art:

...and that is where I stand today. This new book cover is my most recent drawing:

[Lensing]

I like the new leveled up style of figure drawing but the wild nights / hot & crazy days style has something
too. Especially the coloring

[miyaskya]

My art style is influenced by anime and manga, more specifically, CLAMP's earlier works, Hayao Miyazaki, Yoshitaka Amano, and a little bit of Akira Toriyama (moreso for the action sequences rather than character designs). More recent artistic influences are Tsutomu Nihei and manhua artist Xu Xianzhe (Blades of the Guardian).

[Leyelle]

(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)

[Leyelle]

Thought I'd talk about another one of my Art styles. This one is probably inspired by the children's books I used to read as a little kid and also some cartoons. I use the water color setting for it and I love how loose all the details look in this style. Just enough to allow people to imagine in the rest of the details

[SwordSong]

Despite the fact that I'm not really a gamer, my art style is heavily influenced by video game art, especially Eastern RPGs such as Final Fantasy, Ragnarok Online, Koei Warriors (Dynasty, Samurai, Orochi, etc.). However, since I'm primarily a penciler, I also gravitate towards manga, where black-and-white reigns supreme.

Old fanart of a manga I like:

[Leyelle]

Sometimes we're influenced by the things we see even if they aren't our hobbies. the world around us will always have an effect on us and video games are unavoidable XD

[Leyelle]

I dug back up yet another one of my old art styles today

[SwordSong]

Hee, I used to subscribe to game magazines, browse MMORPG sites, wikis, etc. for art references. For the record, I do play games (used to play Koei warriors when PS2 was still a thing), but nowadays I just stick to casual mobile games.

[ZAPPI]

The art for my comic CrimiNET is deeply inspired by early 2000s Nickelodeon/Cartoon Network cartoons. Mosty by the works of Butch Hartman, Craig McCracken, and even a bit of Jamie Hewlett in there, who is the artist who created Gorillaz in the early 2000s. I guess I'm just a sucker for thick-outlined characters in minimalistic backrounds.

[remiquise]

Most my childhood memories are so spotty I cannot honestly say where I picked up my style. I know I watched a few animes, and no doubt I picked up some of my style from those... but it doesn't look like the animes I watched. Naruto, Inuyasha, FMA... So as for where is all began I really cannot say, probably random drawings I'd take and use as my rp characters while being entirely too young for rping with strangers online... but even looking back at old pieces I can see I've building upon whatever I came up with as a teenager.
Case in point (ignore 2007);

I know my shading style (on full pieces, not comics) was a poor attempt to copy one dark souls 3 fanart's rendering. I now do the great taboo of doing shadows with reds and other warm colours... Oh, and outlining the edges of the shadows a shade darker for some reason.

How I use overlay to make colours pop more came from a fill bucket mistake I made one and realized it was actually better, birthing my love of coloured "lighting" now. I probably overdo it; here's a very silver character straight up being purple because of my heavy overlay hand;

For a while I tried doing narrower eyes and more "realistic" range of expression and motion and what not-- since my tattoo artist of a father would shit on my "anime bullshit", but stopped caring in recent years because, well, why should i care about the opinion of someone who basically vanished from my life bar Christmas when I was 8? lmao. I'll make the eyes as big as I please, thanks..

Since it's been stagnating generally for years now, I think I'm stuck with it like it or not. If it's "me" I couldn't say, but it's mine. Do I like it..? For years I hated it, and I still find myself recoiling if I see it when I wasn't expecting it. I respect it for what it is now. It's never going to get me a job, fame, fortune, anything of the like on it's own and that's okay.(It can get a following if I use it for evil... My old blog proved such.). It's fine. It's my joy and I've been forcing myself to respect it as such, so count that as "Like" if you please.

[Leyelle]

How I use overlay to make colours pop more came from a fill bucket mistake I made one and realized it was actually better, birthing my love of coloured "lighting" now. I probably overdo it; here's a very silver character straight up being purple because of my heavy overlay hand;

i think colored lighting adds a cool effect. many kinds of lighting have at least a little bit of color anyway, we just don't notice them as often because we're used to blue and yellow light

[Leyelle]

I used a very different style for my most recent Mental Soup panel by I like the effect, though it's hard to trace what it reminds me of.

[krazycafetales262]

My style started out as stick figures and kind of developed from there. I decided which parts I wanted to make more detailed while keeping others things (like hands) more simplified.

I agree with the idea that your style just comes over time as you try different things and decide which to keep and which to ignore.

[Leyelle]

finally got into drawing in this style again

[Leyelle]

My own take on vintage cartoon style

I think my art may have leveled up again. The line art looks like a coloring page to me.

[theyrebothakilogram]

Think I already posted this somewhere else, but I figured I could post it here too! I've done a couple pieces in the arcane artstyle

And a couple different styles as well :))

[ArtGremlin]

Was inspired by @theyrebothakilogram to try drawing in Arcane’s style, so I used Viktor as a reference to draw my oc Victor

He actually looks 21 now bro looks like a baby how I draw him normally 🥲