The Easel

/slaps the top of my own head
This brain can fit so many different art styles...

How about you? Cannot escape the long-lashed influence of early manga consumption?? Lineweight stuck in sharpie felt-tip limbo? Ballpoint pen sketches still your comfort zone, because nothing else can feather the fox fur so well?

Dare I EVEN MENTION the magic that was being introduced to a mechanical pencil's amazingly steady applique!

And that's only material difference, foundational to the how, where, and when one's drawing style evolves. I was in love with alcohol-based markers that could so accurately mimic smooth animation color, and that place-held for the infinite color choice that digital could eventually offer.

What's your material style, and how has it affected your illustrative habits? Archival quality inks for comic panel setups? Charcoals and landscapes? Markers and collage for protopunk 'zine lean?

Oil paint realism?? 8D (OIL PAINT CARTOONISM?)

I moved my office setup and haven't got around to the last half of unpacking, please procrastination-san forum-wan-kenobi, you're my only hope.

HO BOY. I used to be super duper super duper into Anime, Sailor Moon specifically, and Neopets, so those are the foundations of my style. I have.... old art on a hard drive in my basement somewhere but nothing I can share currently RIP.

I DO have to say that I'm very much a digital artist (Ctrl+Z is as important to my art as insulin is to my body lmao) but I'm having a ton of fun exploring different mediums within digital. The VR oil painting simulator is mind blowingly amazing and allowing me to push out of my comfort zone a bunch.

I'm considering giving 3D painting in VR another try too. So more like... sculpting?? I feel I lack a dimensional awareness for art but it seems like an interesting challenge to get me wayyyy out of my comfort zone!

over the years I went threw various styles oil painting, charcoal, painting temporary murals, and window murals though lately, I am back to pad and paper. I am fascinated with temporary art: painting items that only last for a short time.

I've been drawing since I was a little kid, which was primarily pushed by zoology being my first love. At first, I mainly drew animals, especially dogs. I occasionally tried to draw people, but I just wasn't very interested in people. When I was 7, dragons overtook my life, in part due to how much I adored the illustrations in the Dragonology books--some examples here, for anyone unfamiliar with the series: x, x, x, x

For much of this time, I didn't draw humans at all. They were entirely boring to me, until a friend in elementary school showed me her Inuyasha fanart, LOL. She taught me how she drew people, and my interests in Naruto and Pokemon further influenced the anime style.

Then, fatefully, at age 12, I bought Fable 2. And decided anime sucked, which was obviously silly.

Fable 2's instruction booklet was positively littered with the game's beautiful concept art, from swords to guns to people, and I fell head over heels in love with the game's visual style and tone. Some examples of concept art from the game: x, x, x I now own the art book for the game, and it's one of my most prized possessions! I still find my style is probably the most influenced by Fable out of anything.

Once I got into Fable, I loved drawing people, and making weird designs for characters. I followed an artist on dA back in the day, as well, who did a lot of Fable art, and their style definitely influenced me a lot, but I'm not sure what they're up to now, and I'd rather not bother going down THAT internet rabbit hole right now, so you'll just have to take my word for it. I also got into Oblivion around this time, which further cemented my love for fantasy that had been brewing my whole life, haha.

I also got really involved in the speculative biology side of dA--following people who calculated their OCs' bite PSI...still unbelievable to me--which combined with my love of fantasy, as well as my budding love for sci-fi that Mass Effect rocketed into space, lol. So speculative biology and weird creature design became huge elements of my wheelhouse for a long time.

Unfortunately, I eventually got really into fandom stuff, and though I occasionally did some cool stuff, I kind of languished in terms of my creativity. (Not to say that this is the case for everyone, of course! Fanart just honestly made me lazy.) I'd occasionally come up with some really cool xenobiology headcanons for Homestuck or things like that, but I just didn't do a lot of original work for a few years. I'm still coming back from all of that, honestly, but I got really into art again a couple years ago, and I've been striving to improve and get back into the kinds of things I used to love drawing.

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As for medium, that's a lot simpler. I started with pencil and paper, then started getting into inking with Faber-Castell pens. I also learned that I love ballpoint penwork. I drew all over my work at school, and couldn't really focus without drawing, so part of it was habit, and part of it was convenience--it was annoying to do something like, say, paint during class, LOL.

I eventually went to an art high school, which introduced me to more media than I really knew what to do with. I hated leaving my comfort zone of .5mm Kuru Toga pencils and sketch paper. But as much as I hated it, I did do some experimentation with painting and lino-cuts and other stuff. I'd love to have that level of freedom to experiment again! I'm sad that I kind of squandered it, but I was dealing with a lot in high school, so it's fine I guess.

Nowadays, I don't do much traditional work, but I'd really like to do more. I have a pad of vellum and some Sakura pens, as well as a good selection of mechanical and wooden pencils to choose from. So whenever the mood strikes, I really enjoy revisiting my old favorite medium.

As for digital work...I've been dipping my toes into digital work since I was under 10 years old and continued to do so in my tweens, slowly experimenting with Photoshop Elements and MS Paint and iScribble (if anyone remembers that site...), but I only truly got serious when I was 15. I got a hand-me-down tablet from a Photoshop Hall-of-Famer and my dad started really taking my art seriously, so he bought me my Cintiq 22HD for my 16th birthday, which I still use to this day. I hated coloring in Photoshop, but I started getting more into it once I used SAI (I started using it around 18), and then finally, truly fell in love with coloring when I was in my early 20s. When I bought CSP, I'd finally found a program that I truly loved, and coloring became hugely fun, rather than the chore that it had been prior.

I started doing a lot more stylistic experimentation in my early 20s, as well, though I've always loved experimenting with style. Then, I guess a couple years ago?, I started getting back into doing anime-style art again. I'm still really rusty, and it's hard to construct stuff in that style sometimes, but it's a ton of fun!

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Anyway...I hope this doesn't end up being a huge wall of text, but if it is, I'm very sorry. I love talking about this stuff. I'm sure I forgot to include many details, but that's probably for the best, LOL. I'm pretty proud of my journey as an artist so far, and I hope that I can find more interesting stuff to work with and take inspiration from in the future! I'd love to get more into 3D art when I can afford to buy clay--I've tried Blender, but I really think I'd rather just use clay, lol. I don't know how to explain it, but since I can't see in my own head, my process involves a lot of "feeling out" the shape and composition rather than visualizing it. So when I have sculpted, it's felt really natural to me! Hopefully I can afford clay sometime soon. /end wall LOL

OH MAN, DO IT
Turns out, 3D study helps 2D reasoning!! They help each other!
growth.meme

OOooooOOOooo yeah I used to love chalk art on pavements; it's freeing when you know it's only temporary, like it's okay to 'make mistakes' and the effort itself becomes meditative. Plus, there's always photographs of the end result. 8D

We did colored sand-art on public park tableaus when I was a kid, too, and that's so tactile and great for moving / exercise, really helps train your core for the whole sitting-at-an-easel discipline, haha, made me grateful for vertical surfaces for sure!

We have this air-dry sculpty clay stuff for miniatures and form study, it's cheap (inexpensive, and also not sturdy lol) but the real struggle is keeping a SPACE to do clay work in, because. The Cats. @_@

My arting journey started out on those roadside diner placemats, the ones that restaurants used to set down for kids, with the WORST MOST CHEAPEST CRAYONS to color with lmao. I was a very quiet kid, especially in public places, so when I expressed such a fanatic interest in coloring my family SEIZED on the opportunity to give me an avenue of expression and just threw everything from the art store at me for all the major holidays, haha!

I never lost the coloring book fanatacism, especially when the oughts gave us that fad 'adult coloring books' that were all kinds of patterns and intricate lineart; oh man don't even get me started on those teen bedroom posters with the black velvet glue-printed on the black bits; we got the extra fancy sharpies in all the seasonal shades to finish one of those, it was a group effort like a jigsaw (sister) or lego castle (brother).

So I always equate drawing / creating with being around people. In my highschool days I brought sketchbook and pencil / pen arrangement to the latenight tabletop meetups at the 24 hr greasy spoon, and if it wasn't a sketchbook it was a notebook to write and plot in, or design sites and games, and...? Like I never lamented about being 'poor', because me and the nerdsgroup had all this free time and limited opportunity for entertainment that we were allowed the elbow room to just hang out, just talk, just create things together because we didn't have money to buy what somebody else had already drawn or written or coded or filmed or --

Yeah.

I even used to hook my non-artistic friends into things like papercrafts and stopmotion filming (with playdough, lol); we were practically a studio, doing for each other what studios in the 70s and 80s did for public television -- scripts, yes-anding, character design, humor and heart. The necessary calm of an idle hour, mang, I wouldn't trade it for money.

Loves me some permacraft lifestyle. Loves. It.

Honestly, the materials I use matter a little less for me than what I'm actually battling with my art: my terrible, debilitating eyesight. I learned a long time ago that the way my eyes are crossed will forever hinder my depth perception and my extremely poor vision is going to make it difficult to grasp more than the fuzzy outlines of shapes and forms.

However, because the powers that be play games with us all, I have one extra rod in each of my eyes. This means I can see colors on a spectrum that 75% of the human population will never know exist. My ability to recognize subtle differences in color lent me to lean hard into playing with color even before learning any other art fundamental. As a result, what I lean into are fairly impressionistic styles that focus a lot more on light and shadow than contours or the more technical facets of anatomy.

That's why everything I make looks so unclean. My idea of sketching is to take a huge brush and fill in big blobs of a shape, and then cut away with a soft erase tool or the same brush with a transparent color. (SAI has a shortcut for turning any brush into an eraser so this works well for me.) I also made all of my brushes to do specific things for me that lend to plopping down shapes and I let the motion of my pen do the rest. It's how I get wispy clouds and leaning grass that look like the wind is carrying them, because my eyes might not see blades of grass well, but they have seen grass in motion.

When I paint traditional art, I lean into a pretty chaotic style. I learned from Bob Ross videos to keep the brush moving so you don't overwork any one area, and none of mu brushwork is really fine or detailed. I couldn't see it anyway if it were, so things like thin stems are drawn with quick strokes and treelines are made by jabbing the page with a filbert brush that I keep moving and turning in my hand. It's just a matter of building the color, but trying to not stay in one place.

Even in digital art though, I have an aversion to overworking areas. I have the bad habit of doing it with characters sometimes, and have to curb this habit often. But with landscapes, it's easier to be looser and let go. I think that's why some people have told me that there's some kinetic quality to what I make (well, one person has said that, at least, haha), because I keep the brush moving, and I think the actual brush strokes show up even in digital art.

TL;DR my tools are either chosen or created to cope with a disability, along with leaning hard into my strengths while avoiding my weak points entirely, since trying to correct them just gives ne eye strain.