hi i love your ver of hua cheng very much!!! i was wondering if you could share how you developed your style, or how you practiced expressions? much love!!
Thank you so much!! What a thoughtful ask <33 Character expression and "acting" is probably my favorite thing to draw, and it's the thing I'm usually imagining first that motivates me to draw. So that has naturally become one of my strengths, because it's the thing I draw the most and spend the most mental energy on. Other things a drawing/comic needs come to me later as an afterthought, so that's what takes more discipline to actually make an effort to practice. Regarding style: I believe an enlightening way to look at "style" is to realize that style is mostly the result of how an artist navigates what they CAN'T do. There are probably a relatively small percentage of artists out there who have enough control to pick & choose a "style" or mimic a given way of drawing. (Animators, you are BEASTS.) Most people draw the way they draw, and when they come up against something they're "bad" at or feel unsatisfied with, they end up developing lil habits and cheats to camouflage what they don't know, side-step what they can't do, and showcase their strengths to drown out (what they feel are) their weaknesses. The artist you admire for their raw, sketchy, scribbly realness is not so much Choosing to draw that way because they are cooler and grungier and more of an artistic free spirit than you - they probably can't draw a polished illustration or an anatomically correct figure to their satisfaction, and so they have fled deeper into the woods of expressing themselves the way they CAN. The artist you admire for their incredible use of surreal, over-the-top colors might have started out feeling that their line drawings were awkward and mediocre, but after bedazzling them in this way made them happier with a finished image, they continued down that path. We are all basically evolving like weird animals to adapt to our natural strengths and weaknesses, some of us growing a long freaky proboscis and some of us ending up with a shiny protective shell. I have found this a helpful way of viewing style because it lets you look at others' work without rose-tinted glasses once in a while, and hopefully also lets you look at your own work more charitably. Of course it's always great to keep pushing yourself and improving, but in the meantime, those things you're doing while cringing and thinking "GOD I HOPE NO ONE CAN TELL THAT I'M BAD AT THIS! I HOPE THIS FOOLS EVERYBODY!" are all adding up to become part of your "style" organically, whether you know it or not. So in short, I developed my style by trying REALLY HARD to BAMBOOZLE people into THINKING I CAN DRAW!!! ;)
This is so real... blowing my mind to think of style as NOT ONLY something that happens because Only You Can Draw How You Draw, but it's something that evolves through exploring what techniques bring you joy, what highlights the things you're good at, and what helps you just straight up Get The Thing On The Page.
Art is not made purely from skill... It is also made from our human limitations and shortcomings. Ain't that COOOOOL
