idk do people want my advice about art styles? i’m gonna give it anyway
style can be conscious or unconscious, but basically it’s doing something, deciding ‘I LIKE THIS’ and then continuing to do it
sometimes you actively look at your art and say wow, i like how i did this nose, i’m going to do it more. sometimes you don’t THINK about it, you just somewhere along the line start scribbling all your hairlines because when you move faster it feels more natural somehow. both of those are ways to change your style.
now here’s where it gets more nuanced–there are BIG style changes, and little style changes. when you’re first learning how to art, YOU CAN’T MAKE LITTLE CHANGES. you don’t have the consistency to do that. that’s why so many young artists ‘adopt’ a style, like manga. it’s easy to see, easy to visualize, and you make a LOT of progress when you teach your hand to copy shapes and formulas from someone else. and before that elitist says anything about ‘just copying everything’, lemme tell you–this is something legit art teachers promote in their classes. most formal art classes will at some point give you a famous painting/sculpture/etc and ask you to recreate it, to copy it. you learn things that way.
once your hand knows how to move and how to handle your materials and your eye knows what to look for, you start to deviate from what you’ve been taught and make it your own. you make little changes–you change your lines to be thinner, or you focus more on the shape of the profile, or you exaggerate the hands, etc etc etc, and once you do that for long enough–tada! you have a style of your very own!
it’s all about those two steps: teach and tweak!
and you can repeat them indefinitely! if you decide your anatomy looks off, you can teach your hand to build things using the coil method! if you want to use colors differently, you can teach your eye to mix them closer together! you’re never really done teaching yourself, and you’re never really done tweaking your work. not even the people who LOOK like they’ve had the same style for thirty years are done. i promise if you look at early peanuts comics and compare them to the end of the line, they’ll look slightly different. don’t get discouraged and think ‘well i’ll never get there’ because you will! it’s inevitable, really. one day you’ll look at your work and go HM MAYBE IF I CHANGE THIS ONE LITTLE THING and then there you are! you’re making your own style!
understand?
@zenthisoror exactly!! when you do that long enough, you’ll find what’s most comfortable to execute and what looks best to you, and the cumulative effort of all that is your style!
it took me a while to be able to sit back and ‘see’ my own style, because the change was gradual and i had to learn how to make things consistent enough to stick. but now i see it! and i’m 100% certain that if you do art and stick to it, you’ll eventually find your own!
