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Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
Owlor@meow.social ("Owlor 🦋") wrote:
I think one thing that messes you up as an artist is that the style you have in your head is only rarely reflected by your style as it appears on paper. So your assessment of your art tends to be a lot more negative than the people who are only seeing it on the page and don't know what it's supposed to look like.
Like, I think in my head, my artstyle looks a lot like Jamie Hewlett, this combination of very iconic characters and very intricate objects, but that is not how I draw at all. Most of that is the basic fact that I'm no Jamie Hewlett, but even a version of me with all the skills in the world probably wouldn't draw like that cus of other quirks about my process.
I tend to favor lines that while they aren't always conspicuously chunky is still a bit too thick to do intricate lineart and my personality tends to push me towards a "keep it simple, stupid" sort of ethos even when the initial idea was a lot more intricate.
Definitely aren't ruling out more of a masking effect sort of artstyle as my skills improve, but it still is probably not going to look like what it looks like in my head, and I think there's a pretty good chance those mental images aren't as well-formed as I like to think they are anyway.
Like, if you can picture a bicycle in some detail, can you actually draw a functioning bike with no reference? Experiments have shown that most people can't, your mental model of a bike may feel clear in your head, but in practice there's a lot of handwaving done.
I keep thinking about Ursula Vernon trying to make interactive fiction for the first time and realizing that in fiction, you can get away with suggesting something by metaphorically hiding behind a bush and waving an okapi butt on a stick (Ursula Vernon has a way with words), but when you're making a game, you have to write the whole damn okapi and know how it works.
And like, that's basically the difference between your mental image and your art too, you're seeing the okapi butt on a stick, but you have to draw the whole okapi.