my style

Alexander11

When does my STYLE start shining through my work? Everything I pump out seems to not have any kind of style which is similar to anything else.

When did you find that your styles started showing? And if you have the picture that did it, post it!

Kazhiim

I'm not an artist, so whatever, but the first step to becoming a good one seems to be to learn about the elements of art that are common among all good artists: form and space, anatomy, light, and so forth. Once you've gained an understanding of those, you can stylize without producing crap.

Altpost: nowadays everyone wants to draw anime

LinkWorshiper

My personal style kind of came as a hybrid of things I collected from other artists. For instance, I have a very loose, kind of feathery line thanks to Yoshitaka Amano as well as kind of dark, droopy eyes. I draw intense hair thanks to CLAMP and crazy, graphic-y things thanks to Murakami. Etc. It's no good to try and copy something exactly from another artist, but if there are certain things you like, I find that they'll eventually meld together into your own thing, no matter what it is.

As an aside, I think there's nothing wrong with drawing anime, but the problem is when people just copy it without remembering that anime itself is a stylization of realism... so to draw anime well, you have to be able to draw realism. It's no different than if everybody was copying Disney princesses or whatever.

Godfather

Questions thread.

ApathyKills

It's not just going to happen on its own it is developed through mindful experimentation

edit: and constant output

Shizumaru

Forget about finding a 'style' per se.. its not really going to help. Just work on your skills. In the mean time, look at other artists whose work really really moves you. But don't just sit there and say 'hey thats pretty'. Find out why you like the art you do. What is it about it? Why does it move you? Is it the color? The design? etc.. This will help you key in on things a bit better.. I think it also really helps to be very introspective of yourself. You have to know what makes you tic. What things do you sort of naturally respond to.. But I wouldn't count on just looking at a bunch of stuff, or just drawing a ton.

Mustang

Personally I think style is a little over-rated. Sure it's great that people can recognise your work by the way it's been created but if your too pent up on having a style it can limit your learning. Learning is always first, Stlye a very distant second. I actually don't think about style at all, I'm pretty sure I don't have one, at my stage I don't want to limit myself in anyway but I'm slowly discovering where I think I might like to be.

ApathyKills

Mustang wrote: »

Personally I think style is a little over-rated. Sure it's great that people can recognise your work by the way it's been created but if your too pent up on having a style it can limit your learning. Learning is always first, Stlye a very distant second. I actually don't think about style at all, I'm pretty sure I don't have one, at my stage I don't want to limit myself in anyway but I'm slowly discovering where I think I might like to be.

creating something that is unique is overrated? what?

misosoup

Style isn't a single thing that stays with you forever, look at any artist, their style changes, but it's not (in most cases) something that is desperately grabbed at, but something that comes from the process. I like to think that the images I do now have a style, but I don't like to think that I will always be doing images like this, I like to push out of my style, because once you give in to a style you stop being interesting (and intested I would imagine). Even artists that are considered to have a very distict style don't stick to that, take people like Yoshitaka Amano for instance, you could spot his drawings a mile off even if they were wearing cammo and ducking behing a particularly bulky thicket, but he still has progression, deviation and progress in his work.

Don't try so hard at having a style, just keep working, looking, learning and eventually you will find yourself as an evolving, interesting artist.

par example

2000+ work http://www.amanosworld.com/html/images/intro2.jpg
1980's work http://www.amanosworld.com/html/images/chimera8.jpg

Scalfin

I tend to think that style is a set of strategies to maximize clarity, expressiveness, and, in the case of anime, speed. Overdraw some things, and it becomes crowded, underdraw others, and it becomes empty. Some people (Gabe) like to keep their faces simple to maximize expressiveness. Many people working shortly before the popularization of the camera had a very static style informed by sketching, which was governed by a set of strategies intended to capture as much detail in as little time as possible (a good example of this difference can be found in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, where a crude work drawn by an autistic child captures much more of the moment than the painting he was copying). Anime is very, very good at capturing events on a deadline.
Another matter is how you handle the cognitive aspects of vision. For example, not all artists reduce the color contrast of works supposed to take place in limited light. Cezanne made sure to draw distant objects in cooler colors to take advantage of the slight blue shift the air causes. Other artists put a lot of effort into trying to capture binocular vision (Picasso's famous style was intended to capture it by drawing each half of a face with how it looked from the corresponding eye).

And then there are ways to make a mech look really fucking cool.

Mustang

ApathyKills wrote: »

Mustang wrote: »

Personally I think style is a little over-rated. Sure it's great that people can recognise your work by the way it's been created but if your too pent up on having a style it can limit your learning. Learning is always first, Stlye a very distant second. I actually don't think about style at all, I'm pretty sure I don't have one, at my stage I don't want to limit myself in anyway but I'm slowly discovering where I think I might like to be.

creating something that is unique is overrated? what?

That's not what I said, I said people get to pent up over having a style when what they should be doing is learning, the style will come all on it's own.

Rankenphile

never seek style.

it comes on its own.

work on learning to draw, your own idiosyncrasies come out in time. Anything else is forced and artificial and will only hinder your progress.

Nappuccino

I hate to ask, but why is this thread still existent?

Loomdun

Because it does not matter whether or not a mod is on the ball, this is not harming people emotionally and physically, its more of a minor nuisance that occurs un-often and does not inspire a rally of random-ness like I inspire

Ollie

Nappuccino wrote: »

I hate to ask, but why is this thread still existent?

Because it's a fun topic to discuss. The Questions thread always seemed more suitable for more technical questions, imho.

Anyway, keep in mind that style is a lot like handwriting. It develops slowly on its own over time, so long as you continue to draw without tracing or copying every image you see.