Everything I draw ends up wearing a bow-tie

Anonymous asked: Hello! I've just recently been introduced to the world of cartooning and I'm struggling to find a personal style. I was wondering how your own drawing skills grew, and what you did to become comfortable with it. Right now I feel like I'm trying to hard to replicate others work because I'm not yet confident enough to sit down with a blank piece of paper. Any advice? Love your art, especially the gravity falls stuff 0:

Well gosh, hard question- sense of style and personal style is something that develops with time and experimentation, and copying to learn is a great way to go about that! The only thing I would warn about that idea is really trying to mimic one and only one particular style; you can box yourself in and make yourself into a professional, forgetable copycat by doing that. What you want to do is copy and learn from a lot of different places and people- and by learning I mean thinking about what you are copying. Look at the artwork, think about what it is that draws you to it and makes it appealing (is it the shapes? the linestyle? the expressions?), and then try smushing one or more of those qualities together with another from a different source! One of my favourite daydreaming pasttimes is to take two totally different ideas and smash them together, it’s how I’ve come up with a lot of my stories but it also works for drawing styles. Try combining two of your favourite artist’s styles into one hybrid version, or replicate a drawing you like in a different style- learn by copying, but don’t just be a photocopier. Most of all don’t feel pressured to match a style that is popular. What is ‘in’ isn’t necessarily what you like, nor is it necessarily good! There is no right or wrong way to draw. Play with your art, and keep playing, because playing is learning; it is taking ideas and shoving them around and messing about and making something new. If you keep doing that you will not only develop your own style in time (and that sneaks up on you, trust me, it was a big surprise when someone first told me that I had one!) - but you will become a much more versatile artist than someone who has only one, if distinctive, style. I am constantly trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and try new things, and not all of them work! But that’s how you learn what doesn’t work, and that is just as valuable as knowing what does.

sergeantobliv:

CARTOONS ARE HARD

IF YOU KNOW A CARTOON ARTIST GO GIVE THEM A BIG HUG

STYLIZATION IS HARD

ART IS HARD

NNNNNGUUUGH

(via sergeantobliv-deactivated201405)

TL:DR- when is imitation not the ultimate form of flattery?

(Answering this publicly because I’ve had similar asks before and it’s something I might as well cover for everyone. As for you zilliah, you don’t have to show me the work in question and I’m not mad at all- this is something that happens to every artist who experiments, and every artist should experiment.)

If you’re feeling uncomfortable with your work, then that’s a sign that you should take a step back and evaluate it; stop. Look. Think. What it is about it that is making you feel that way?

Learning new styles is very good for you artistically, but it isn’t the same as copying styles- of course, that is how you learn about new styles, in the beginning, but it’s crucial to move forwards from simple imitation and go on to use it as inspiration. Pick up the traits from different methods that you like and smush them together to make something new. Find something else you like, do it again. ‘The best artists steal’ doesn’t mean copyright infringement or being lazy pays off, it means you have to steal knowledge and convert it into something original. You have to steal intelligently. Do so, and you can commit the perfect crime- you can become an inspiration yourself.

Never post something that worries you. Sometimes it’s tempting to, simply because you’ve drawn it, but hold back, look at it, look for what worries you; there will be a reason for it. Do not be lazy. Do not ignore that uncomfortable feeling. Do not pass it off as you being silly. Trust your instincts. Find the reason. Learn.

If you feel as if you’ve become stuck in a rut or can’t get away from a style, try going in a completely different direction; do some more drawings in a totally different technique or a new medium, go back to your 'old’ style, see what you’ve learned that you can apply, find your groove.

Basically, if you feel like something looks too much like someone else’s work, then it isn’t your work. I don’t mean that in the sense that they will hunt you down and skin you for copying them, I mean that it will not feel right for you, and will never feel right until you figure out what the problem is. Nobody is going to force you to, the challenge is to overcome the inclination to let it be because hopefully nobody will notice. Don’t give in to apathy; you’re better than that, prove it.

Don’t limit yourself to one style, but don’t copy- learn. Kick your butt back into drawing pictures that feel like your own work so you can shove it in people’s faces and say OI. LOOK AT WHAT I DID. I DID THIS.

Righto, carry on then.

TL:DR- style and design stuff I guess

1) I have no idea. One day, you just find people are talking about ‘your style’, and you sit there and say you don’t have one and look confused. I have no real idea of how or when it happened to me, and I would say even now that I have several different styles. Also, the idea of 'sticking with a style’ once you’ve found it can actually be dangerous. Even if people like something, you mustn’t feel like you’re restricted to it- it will stagnate, and you will as well. My SKIP design method resulted from pushing the lines to their extreme, stretching and pulling and pushing everything as far as I could, to the point that it was uncomfortable, but only when I had gone that far could I see where it felt right and pull it back. If you don’t push something to the extreme, you’ll never know how far you could have gone.

Evolution and art go hand in hand; if you stop trying to change, to push yourself and improve, then you’ll go extinct. Change can scare people, and they might not like it; you might explore new methods and tricks that simply don’t work for you, but mistakes are the best way to learn. Some of my best pictures have resulted from mistakes- I remember during foundation year, when I was doing some very precise work with a dip pen, I sneezed and my ink spattered across the page. I almost cried, but then I saw it sort of looked like a cat freaking out. I finished it off as the cat, and started over again for the actual piece. Both were far better than the original would have ever been, and the cat was by far my favourite of the two. I still have it at home somewhere.

2) When I draw feeling I draw movement, and when I draw movement I draw feeling. Animators have to be constantly aware of what happened before and after the split moment in time that they are drawing- why is the cloth moving that way, how are they going to land on that foot, what vowel are they saying with their lips, how are they saying it, why? Why is the biggest question to ask when you are drawing something. You are drawing someone who is shy- why are they shy? What sort of shy are they? Is it gangling and awkward, are they curling in on themselves away from the world, or do they simply not want others to know that they are afraid? In one of my acting classes I was told that the best way to portray an emotion in a scene is to try to be the exact opposite- someone who is scared will try to look brave, and as a result seem even more scared. As long as you know the motive of a character- what the character wants, and why they want it- you can do anything.

Motive drives everything, and that includes lines and shapes. With Hare, I wanted to express menacing resentment- in other words, his prerogative is to look mean, but the drive is bitterness. So, imagine what that emotion looks like, feels like, then think about how humans express it physically and combine the two. The result is everything is hooked over and slouching with the chin jutting right out in the front, like a moody teenager trying to make a point that he plain does not give a shit about posture or anything else. The shape is curling in and around itself with hooks and snarls- even though it still reads as aggressive, when you analyze it an abstract way, it is still defensive. He is creating a barrier against the world around him with his own construct.

Silhouette is very important in character design, but it is equally important in character acting- if you can tell what the character is doing by their silhouette, it’s a good drawing, if you can tell what the character is feeling by their silhouette, it’s a great drawing.