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Art lecture
Spending lunchtime lecturing people over on DeviantArt again. Here's a reply to someone concerned that she wasn't improving and wondered if it was because she had too many art styles.
Reposting here because I think I can mine my suggestions for ... something. A tutorial or random generator, maybe.
Honestly, looking at your gallery I'm seeing one style, not many. I see several different techniques, but for the most part, you could pick any two characters and stick them next to each other and they'd look like they came from the same manga. *You're* seeing different styles because you're close to the images, and you know what was in your head at the time you were drawing them, and you're sensitive to small differences that aren't apparent to the casual viewer.
I think you're not improving as fast as you'd like because you're not challenging yourself. As I scroll through your gallery, I see a lot of portraits, mostly women, torso or bust, posing as if for a camera, with little or no background, with soft, pastel coloring, and for goodness' sake, they're usually facing to the left. But you're good at that. Perhaps you've gotten as far as you're going to get with that right now and you need to try something new.
And by "trying something new" I mean drastically different, to kick yourself out of the rut. When my grandmother was taking painting classes, at one point her teacher had her throw away all her brushes and use only a palette knife to paint with for a year. *That's* the sort of drastic I'm talking about. You don't necessarily need to change for a full year, just long enough to stretch your brain, get it thinking and seeing in new ways, and to kick yourself out of the rut you're in. Switching things up a lot forces your brain to grow in different ways, which drastically improves your art - I can spot improvements in my art and tie them into periods where I stopped drawing and took lots of photos, or took an oil painting class, or took life drawing, or learned a completely different technique and applied it.
And don't be like the person who tried one thing I suggested once, didn't like the result, and went back to her same way of drawing, continuing to complain that she couldn't improve. Of course you won't be better the first time you try something different! You need to practice at it like you practice at anything.
What to change? Could be anything.
Try a new CG program.
Switch to B&W.
Limit your palette to three contrasting colors.
Draw still lifes. (If you think a regular still life is boring, pick one of your characters and assemble a still life out of objects that have meaning to them. You can draw a portrait of a person without the person even being in the picture.)
Pick up a camera and try photography.
Draw all your characters as chibi.
Try life drawing for a while.
Draw a manga page.
Pick an Old Master painting and copy it. Then try it again, in manga style.
Use a random prompts generator to come up with prompts (I wrote this one to get myself out of artists' block).
Announce on your DA journal that you'll draw the characters of the first three people who reply.
Draw each of your characters eating their favorite food. Or in their bedroom. Or at work. Or living their ultimate fantasy.
Draw a character and do a background where every single item has some personal meaning to the character.
Look through the Daily Deviations, find one you like, and analyze it to figure out what you like (the colors? the composition?) and try to incorporate those elements into a picture of your own.
Do a portrait of a character that tells you that character's personality ... by drawing only their feet.
=======
These are things I came up with in about five minutes, although I admit that I can only do that when I'm thinking of things for other people to draw. XD But you get the idea - find soemthing drastically different than what you do every day, and do it for a while. When you come back to your old techniques, you'll probably find that it's changed a bit, for the better. :)
Good luck!
Reposting here because I think I can mine my suggestions for ... something. A tutorial or random generator, maybe.
Honestly, looking at your gallery I'm seeing one style, not many. I see several different techniques, but for the most part, you could pick any two characters and stick them next to each other and they'd look like they came from the same manga. *You're* seeing different styles because you're close to the images, and you know what was in your head at the time you were drawing them, and you're sensitive to small differences that aren't apparent to the casual viewer.
I think you're not improving as fast as you'd like because you're not challenging yourself. As I scroll through your gallery, I see a lot of portraits, mostly women, torso or bust, posing as if for a camera, with little or no background, with soft, pastel coloring, and for goodness' sake, they're usually facing to the left. But you're good at that. Perhaps you've gotten as far as you're going to get with that right now and you need to try something new.
And by "trying something new" I mean drastically different, to kick yourself out of the rut. When my grandmother was taking painting classes, at one point her teacher had her throw away all her brushes and use only a palette knife to paint with for a year. *That's* the sort of drastic I'm talking about. You don't necessarily need to change for a full year, just long enough to stretch your brain, get it thinking and seeing in new ways, and to kick yourself out of the rut you're in. Switching things up a lot forces your brain to grow in different ways, which drastically improves your art - I can spot improvements in my art and tie them into periods where I stopped drawing and took lots of photos, or took an oil painting class, or took life drawing, or learned a completely different technique and applied it.
And don't be like the person who tried one thing I suggested once, didn't like the result, and went back to her same way of drawing, continuing to complain that she couldn't improve. Of course you won't be better the first time you try something different! You need to practice at it like you practice at anything.
What to change? Could be anything.
Try a new CG program.
Switch to B&W.
Limit your palette to three contrasting colors.
Draw still lifes. (If you think a regular still life is boring, pick one of your characters and assemble a still life out of objects that have meaning to them. You can draw a portrait of a person without the person even being in the picture.)
Pick up a camera and try photography.
Draw all your characters as chibi.
Try life drawing for a while.
Draw a manga page.
Pick an Old Master painting and copy it. Then try it again, in manga style.
Use a random prompts generator to come up with prompts (I wrote this one to get myself out of artists' block).
Announce on your DA journal that you'll draw the characters of the first three people who reply.
Draw each of your characters eating their favorite food. Or in their bedroom. Or at work. Or living their ultimate fantasy.
Draw a character and do a background where every single item has some personal meaning to the character.
Look through the Daily Deviations, find one you like, and analyze it to figure out what you like (the colors? the composition?) and try to incorporate those elements into a picture of your own.
Do a portrait of a character that tells you that character's personality ... by drawing only their feet.
=======
These are things I came up with in about five minutes, although I admit that I can only do that when I'm thinking of things for other people to draw. XD But you get the idea - find soemthing drastically different than what you do every day, and do it for a while. When you come back to your old techniques, you'll probably find that it's changed a bit, for the better. :)
Good luck!
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I've got the same problem, really, of having "too many styles", and I can never decide which way I want to refine my skills. Manga-y? Comic book-y? Painted fantasy art-y?
(The other problem is I don't practice enough, so there's really no chance of refining anything.)
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As far as you go, my general impression is that Versatility is Good, and you should work on whatever the picture in question needs. If you don't have a specific image in mind, then pick whatever you haven't worked on most recently and do that.
I tend to hop around from style to style and medium to medium, and when I get back to whatever I was doing before the change, it's invariably improved a bit, so I don't worry to much about it: *all* practice helps develop my eye, and since I have a huge problem with getting stuck in a rut, anything that boots me out of it and forces me to stretch is a Good Thing.
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Now if only I could start kicking MY ass into gear.
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Maybe that's actually my problem too, that it's just techniques.
I just bought a tablet - I haven't done graphic "painting" in years, so I'm hoping to learn something new. Plus I want to work with backgrounds, which I only ever did when I was bored as hell way back in High School.
(I did go through and read the whole thing, btw.)
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Can I ask for the Telophase Customized Art Lecture?
I'd love to hear what you would recommend to help me grow in my art. I don't feel like I'm stuck, per se, but that I've reached kind of a watershed. I want to advance, but I'm looking at a bunch of different things trying to decide what that would be.
I love manga dearly, but I'm not sure I am really a manga-artist. I get obsessed about individual panels so much that I lose track of the flow. Maybe I should refocus and try to learn that. *Or* maybe I should focus more on painting. (Or individual pieces.) What I've been doing most recently is a lot of life drawing: anatomy, poses, internal structure. I feel like I'm.... I'm not sure. Ready to move forward to something.
What do you think?
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(Matsumoto is printed out, and will probably be sent off Saturday - I need to get more mailing tubes.)
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I'm so excited about Matsumoto! She's going to be my new office art. *bounces*
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One great story I heard (from a right-handed sculptor) was that breaking her arm in a skiing accident and having to work with her left hand only for two months was the best thing that ever happened to her as an artist. A little drastic, natch, but you could simulate it with a sling! :)
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(all things I've struggled with, and would force me to think outside fine detail)
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