When I started drawing seriously, I thought I have to aim for a personal style too...because you hear it EVERYWHERE! But I came to the conclusion, that I actually don't really want to find it, really quick. I like trying new things and styles. I think that my personal NOTE will shine through somewhen. I felt really alone in this opinion, so thank you very much for this video 🙂
Probably the biggest limitation on modern commercial art is deadlines. Time is money. Comics and Manga really reflect this. If you go through a lot of both forms of sequential media you understand how deadlines effect art. A lot of comic art has limited backgrounds down to negative space. Jack Kirby drew the way he did because he had to pencil out several books a month. Re read that. Books. He had to do triage and put the details in where they were needed. Same thing is true of Manga Ka. You only have so much time in a day and if you have a lot of work to do that limit changes your artistic choices.
People often compliment my style of hard, well-defined shapes, but I only paint this way because when I started in digital art, I used a mouse and didn't have the ability to make smooth color transitions. I found the video very interesting. A good conversation. I think that nowadays, with so many possibilities that digital art offers, it's hard not to feel lost. But I think it also opens up space to be more aware of our choices and why we do something.
Really nice video. Make another one talking about the 'personal style'. Like the 'stroke style', 'line art style', don't know if there is a name haha. I mean, Frank Frazetta have a distinctive line draw style, same for John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Jim Lee, Alex Ross etc. I know it's a difficult one, because the "line art style" is very personal and we can't "decipher" what's going on in the mind/brain and this subject have so many variables (experiences in life, muscle memory, drawing form, etc, until you develop one) but I think is a nice one to discuss! Cheers!
Tim, thank you for your videos! Your channel helped me rediscover the love for painting after a long while. The topics you bring up somehow resonate with all the problems I’ve had while trying to get better at drawing, and the pace and your editing style are wonderful
Hey Tim I’m getting back into art and drawing but am struggling to learn things like anatomy and I really want to unlock a style like yours or of Peter Han and Kim jung gi thanks for these great vids Tim 👍
Thanks for this video, it helped to contextualize and put into words a lot of thoughts I've had swimming in my head for quite some time. I think in addition to all the examples and histories of styles you provided the other most formative thing that helped me really see the importance of understanding art and style history was learning about the development of impressionism and the theory that early impressionist works began from painters doing plein air painting in smog/polluted city conditions in the early industrial age, physical limitations potentially giving rise to a completely new and cherished style of art. It is by far my favorite art style and something I am always looking to experiment with, restricting my brush options and blurring reference photos to work from.
How I try to interpret this is what draws the eye and what does the rest of the piece say about what draws the eye. As an example: on Sword of the Immortal cover I don't think its more sophisticated. Both that and the Frazetta painting are designed to immediately focus the eye on the theme of the story. The SOTI cover was designed to do one thing: emphasize the blood. Its very boldly telling you the story is about shedding blood. Probably in large amounts. That's why the rest of the page is pastel. Frazetta drew your eye straight to the barbarian. The background, the mound of dead bodies,and the woman all point to the focal point: the barbarian. They're both doing the same thing. Focusing on a single theme.
Your general point around painting and historical materials limitations is valid, but needs a bit more nuance. Baroque art like Rembrandt and Caravaggio definitely chose to use much more low-key colours. But there were also lots of artists prior to that who used much richer palettes in Medieval art as well as Renaiassance. Look at Raphael or Michaelangelo, Botticelli or Pontormo, or Giotto and illustrations like Les Tres Riches Heures de le Duc Du Barry. Economics was a factor for sure, but aesthetic philosophy was also a big factor in how paint was used.
Since I was doing comic pages for Artfight this past month as a way of practice, I got a decent amount of feedback on style and several times I was told it looks like Calvin and Hobbes - which is great, since I was a big fan of that series - but it didn't emerge from studying Watterson's drawings intensively, it was a function of working towards liveliness in small-scale ink drawings and landing on similar techniques to comic strip artists. Artfight's scoring system encourages showing off the character designs in full detail and I tend to follow with this and show full figures because my emphasis is on the character acting. But working on a 9x12" paper, my chosen size, makes it very crowded, so I also tend to drop out perspective, integrating the lettering early on and only roughly indicating the scene with what's left over. When I compare what I do with the Marvel-inspired methods or manga, one thing seems to jump out, which is that I'm building the page as one drawing, without separating out the writing or illustration process through heavy panel borders or by using mechanical methods to overlay dialogue and effects. And I might be doing something fundamentally slower because of this, although I could attribute it to my own learning and the nature of the event making me write and draw a completely new cast each time - I completed 6 pages in a month, vs the "over 1 a day" of Jack Kirby's highest productivity or the "15-20 in a week" in manga. But I see the style emerging from the process being one that I'm basically happy with - every experiment I did over the month was a way of trying to make it more fun, not just fast.
amen to this video! I was telling someone interviewing me about animation style, that current cartoon styles in the US are dictated heavily by the software they're created on. For example, I know Toonboom Storyboard-pro dictates how Bob's Burgers and Rick and Morty characters are constructed, because the method in animating those shows have an efficient pipeline for multiple studios to follow as well as a streamlined animation library on a server. Of course there are other ways to animate on those programs, but retraining an entire generation trained to animate in a different way is going to take considerable effort just fighting against the animators themselves to learn and buy-into a different method. And even anime style is useful because you didn't need to relearn how to draw different faces, as most anime characters are only differentiated by their hair and clothes... ask someone who only drew in anime since childhood to do a Disney style face for your show, and you might waste several hundreds of millions of dollars and several season's worth of continuity headaches
I'm trying to kick a lot of modern influence in my style. It's hard because these styles are used as tools or methods that I rely on for a long time. I have to retrain myself to adopt alternative/older methods. If I can get to the point where I can look like Arthur Rakham then my life will be complete.
As a character animator, the ability to make changes without redrawing tons of frames by hand is the golden goose of modern animation. Directors tend to be trigger happy folks by nature, so while it is technically about saving time it often takes just as long to setup, create and render modern animation as it did in the good old days. We really just use less paper 😂
van goghs style is not necessary to do with the him being poor was more about him wanting to get it down fast. It was about speed. It was about capturing the moment. That was his self imposed limitation.
No no! I don't think so. I can definitely combine all the styles that I love ranging across time (back to renaissance) and space (across countries) without making any compromises. I will synthesize the ultimate style and we will reach the terminus of art and that will be that. Jokes aside, definitely good things to consider for artists. As a comic artist I love so many approaches and struggle with finding my path through that. "I love too much, and by such and such, is happiness thrown away" is a Luke Kelly line I often think about in this regard. Especially now in 2024 all of art history is available to be consumed at once which makes for perhaps a schizophrenic artistic soul.
@@CherryCandy2002 Yup haha. It's at a tangent with the line of her breast. Must've been an oversight. Happens to the best of us. I sometimes forget to draw entire parts.
With enough experience, you can visualize the guidelines and don't require them. Kim Jung Gi is an extreme example. In my case, I've done enough figure drawings that I can draw even difficult foreshortened figures directly with either a few or no guidelines as I have developed a good sense of proportion. Now, if I want to make an exact duplicate like a portrait I will use other means like a proportional divider or grid to make sure everything is exact.
after your spend a lot of time, and i mean like a LOT of time drawing with guidelines, they become kind of second nature to you. your freehand gets better, and eventually some artists decide not to use them for the things they seriously know how to do
If drawing were easier, we would change art style like we change our cloths.
3 месяца назад
Dude you seem to meander a lot. A style is a particular set of a shapes an artist takes from an infinite group of shapes that can be done in a plane. The artist limits the range to use when resolving a bidimentional image and keeps using the same types of shape relations until the viewer recognizes the combination as particular of that artist. You can invent a style if you have this clear. Pick a set of shapes and start resolving in that way. The shapes can be anything. A drawing will be more or less attractive not because of which shapes it uses but how it combines them and creates a "storyline". thats why you can still find great art with extremely limited sets of shapes as "pixelart" or "low polygon count art"
When I started drawing seriously, I thought I have to aim for a personal style too...because you hear it EVERYWHERE!
But I came to the conclusion, that I actually don't really want to find it, really quick.
I like trying new things and styles. I think that my personal NOTE will shine through somewhen.
I felt really alone in this opinion, so thank you very much for this video 🙂
Probably the biggest limitation on modern commercial art is deadlines. Time is money. Comics and Manga really reflect this. If you go through a lot of both forms of sequential media you understand how deadlines effect art. A lot of comic art has limited backgrounds down to negative space.
Jack Kirby drew the way he did because he had to pencil out several books a month. Re read that. Books. He had to do triage and put the details in where they were needed. Same thing is true of Manga Ka. You only have so much time in a day and if you have a lot of work to do that limit changes your artistic choices.
People often compliment my style of hard, well-defined shapes, but I only paint this way because when I started in digital art, I used a mouse and didn't have the ability to make smooth color transitions.
I found the video very interesting. A good conversation. I think that nowadays, with so many possibilities that digital art offers, it's hard not to feel lost. But I think it also opens up space to be more aware of our choices and why we do something.
Really nice video. Make another one talking about the 'personal style'. Like the 'stroke style', 'line art style', don't know if there is a name haha. I mean, Frank Frazetta have a distinctive line draw style, same for John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Jim Lee, Alex Ross etc. I know it's a difficult one, because the "line art style" is very personal and we can't "decipher" what's going on in the mind/brain and this subject have so many variables (experiences in life, muscle memory, drawing form, etc, until you develop one) but I think is a nice one to discuss! Cheers!
Tim, thank you for your videos! Your channel helped me rediscover the love for painting after a long while. The topics you bring up somehow resonate with all the problems I’ve had while trying to get better at drawing, and the pace and your editing style are wonderful
Hey Tim I’m getting back into art and drawing but am struggling to learn things like anatomy and I really want to unlock a style like yours or of Peter Han and Kim jung gi thanks for these great vids Tim 👍
Thanks for this video, it helped to contextualize and put into words a lot of thoughts I've had swimming in my head for quite some time. I think in addition to all the examples and histories of styles you provided the other most formative thing that helped me really see the importance of understanding art and style history was learning about the development of impressionism and the theory that early impressionist works began from painters doing plein air painting in smog/polluted city conditions in the early industrial age, physical limitations potentially giving rise to a completely new and cherished style of art. It is by far my favorite art style and something I am always looking to experiment with, restricting my brush options and blurring reference photos to work from.
Le Chat Noir poster is by Théophile Steinlen.
This channel is a gem ❤
Awesome vid! Been following you since you had less than 500 subs.
How I try to interpret this is what draws the eye and what does the rest of the piece say about what draws the eye.
As an example: on Sword of the Immortal cover I don't think its more sophisticated. Both that and the Frazetta painting are designed to immediately focus the eye on the theme of the story. The SOTI cover was designed to do one thing: emphasize the blood. Its very boldly telling you the story is about shedding blood. Probably in large amounts. That's why the rest of the page is pastel. Frazetta drew your eye straight to the barbarian. The background, the mound of dead bodies,and the woman all point to the focal point: the barbarian. They're both doing the same thing. Focusing on a single theme.
Your general point around painting and historical materials limitations is valid, but needs a bit more nuance. Baroque art like Rembrandt and Caravaggio definitely chose to use much more low-key colours. But there were also lots of artists prior to that who used much richer palettes in Medieval art as well as Renaiassance. Look at Raphael or Michaelangelo, Botticelli or Pontormo, or Giotto and illustrations like Les Tres Riches Heures de le Duc Du Barry. Economics was a factor for sure, but aesthetic philosophy was also a big factor in how paint was used.
Another insightful lesson! Thanks!
Since I was doing comic pages for Artfight this past month as a way of practice, I got a decent amount of feedback on style and several times I was told it looks like Calvin and Hobbes - which is great, since I was a big fan of that series - but it didn't emerge from studying Watterson's drawings intensively, it was a function of working towards liveliness in small-scale ink drawings and landing on similar techniques to comic strip artists. Artfight's scoring system encourages showing off the character designs in full detail and I tend to follow with this and show full figures because my emphasis is on the character acting. But working on a 9x12" paper, my chosen size, makes it very crowded, so I also tend to drop out perspective, integrating the lettering early on and only roughly indicating the scene with what's left over.
When I compare what I do with the Marvel-inspired methods or manga, one thing seems to jump out, which is that I'm building the page as one drawing, without separating out the writing or illustration process through heavy panel borders or by using mechanical methods to overlay dialogue and effects. And I might be doing something fundamentally slower because of this, although I could attribute it to my own learning and the nature of the event making me write and draw a completely new cast each time - I completed 6 pages in a month, vs the "over 1 a day" of Jack Kirby's highest productivity or the "15-20 in a week" in manga. But I see the style emerging from the process being one that I'm basically happy with - every experiment I did over the month was a way of trying to make it more fun, not just fast.
Great video!
amen to this video! I was telling someone interviewing me about animation style, that current cartoon styles in the US are dictated heavily by the software they're created on. For example, I know Toonboom Storyboard-pro dictates how Bob's Burgers and Rick and Morty characters are constructed, because the method in animating those shows have an efficient pipeline for multiple studios to follow as well as a streamlined animation library on a server. Of course there are other ways to animate on those programs, but retraining an entire generation trained to animate in a different way is going to take considerable effort just fighting against the animators themselves to learn and buy-into a different method. And even anime style is useful because you didn't need to relearn how to draw different faces, as most anime characters are only differentiated by their hair and clothes... ask someone who only drew in anime since childhood to do a Disney style face for your show, and you might waste several hundreds of millions of dollars and several season's worth of continuity headaches
Very helpful, thank you!
Great points to consider. Thanks Tim! 😎
I'm trying to kick a lot of modern influence in my style. It's hard because these styles are used as tools or methods that I rely on for a long time. I have to retrain myself to adopt alternative/older methods. If I can get to the point where I can look like Arthur Rakham then my life will be complete.
As a character animator, the ability to make changes without redrawing tons of frames by hand is the golden goose of modern animation.
Directors tend to be trigger happy folks by nature, so while it is technically about saving time it often takes just as long to setup, create and render modern animation as it did in the good old days.
We really just use less paper 😂
van goghs style is not necessary to do with the him being poor was more about him wanting to get it down fast. It was about speed. It was about capturing the moment. That was his self imposed limitation.
No no! I don't think so. I can definitely combine all the styles that I love ranging across time (back to renaissance) and space (across countries) without making any compromises. I will synthesize the ultimate style and we will reach the terminus of art and that will be that.
Jokes aside, definitely good things to consider for artists. As a comic artist I love so many approaches and struggle with finding my path through that. "I love too much, and by such and such, is happiness thrown away" is a Luke Kelly line I often think about in this regard. Especially now in 2024 all of art history is available to be consumed at once which makes for perhaps a schizophrenic artistic soul.
Well, if you had infinite time you might succeed. LOL
@@Wastelandman7000 Tempus fuggit, sadly.
There's a tangent in the thumbnail art 🥲
The back arm ?
I took my time to find it and looks like both arms are coming from same shoulder now
@@CherryCandy2002 Yup haha. It's at a tangent with the line of her breast. Must've been an oversight. Happens to the best of us. I sometimes forget to draw entire parts.
now i can’t unsee it 😭
I stared for a minute there to see what's up with that arm, before I realized it's a breast.
Still haven't gotten over the day I chat le noir in front of my girlfriend's parents.
why do people not use all guidelines in drawing
With enough experience, you can visualize the guidelines and don't require them. Kim Jung Gi is an extreme example. In my case, I've done enough figure drawings that I can draw even difficult foreshortened figures directly with either a few or no guidelines as I have developed a good sense of proportion. Now, if I want to make an exact duplicate like a portrait I will use other means like a proportional divider or grid to make sure everything is exact.
after your spend a lot of time, and i mean like a LOT of time drawing with guidelines, they become kind of second nature to you. your freehand gets better, and eventually some artists decide not to use them for the things they seriously know how to do
@@lurkerprivilages nopeI will use my guidelines forever
@@TemesgenAsefa-w4m ok blud
If drawing were easier, we would change art style like we change our cloths.
Dude you seem to meander a lot. A style is a particular set of a shapes an artist takes from an infinite group of shapes that can be done in a plane.
The artist limits the range to use when resolving a bidimentional image and keeps using the same types of shape relations until the viewer recognizes the combination as particular of that artist.
You can invent a style if you have this clear. Pick a set of shapes and start resolving in that way.
The shapes can be anything. A drawing will be more or less attractive not because of which shapes it uses but how it combines them and creates a "storyline". thats why you can still find great art with extremely limited sets of shapes as "pixelart" or "low polygon count art"