#bc i passed the professor in the elevator on the way to the etching class and he told me where he was going lol

[plumbus-central]

How did you develop your art style? Like how did you find your own voice in your art?

Oh what an interesting question, I never expected to asked abt my art!

Honestly i took a while to think abt this question, and I think a lot i've done about developing my own art style came from seeing things i liked in other people's art and copying it lol.

For instance when i was in the [REDACTED] fandom when i was a young teen there was a very popular artist who used gradients in their work to add depth and color and i liked it a lot, so i started doing it in my work too.

A few years ago i started following an artist and really liked their work bc they had such a strong grasp of color, shape, gesture, and line. And they used these strong, thick lines to fill out the form of their work, but i noticed that the lines often didn't touch and that it didn't matter bc you could still understand and make out the form of whatever they drew just fine. So i decided to stop worrying abt MY lines touching either lol. which is how i ended up with those sort of ghost constructions of figures and shapes i do sometimes.

I can vividly remember seeing a comic on tumblr ONCE where i saw a character have just a line for a mouth that went off their face and i just stared at that panel for a while trying to figure out why i liked it so much lol until i realized it was their expression that i liked. So i kept that in my head, and a few years later i realized that i had started using it in my art too.

Another aspect that has influenced my art is exploring other media and being challenged by my own interests. Like when i was a teen i was very into steven universe and my own ocs. which was fine but didn't challenge me too much artistically. Then in college i got into bojack horseman, and specifically my favorite character was herb kazzaz, a short, fat man with a beard. Completely out of my comfort zone to draw, but i wanted to draw him so bad! so i figured it out!

(some of u might actually be familiar w/ my boajck horseman sideblog @hambone-fakenameington , it hasnt been updated in a while cause im on that rick and morty shit right now lol). But now i have to skills to draw these things by way of my interests in the character.

My fixation with rick and morty was actually so strong at first that i was drawing like crazy, which eventually taught me to focus on and hone my skills with gesture, thumbnailing, and composition bc i wanted to draw so many ideas at once that i couldn't spend too long on each one. (and it also gave me lots of practice). Thanks to my interest in R&M ive also developed skills in drawing very skinny bodies lol, but also on pushing expressions and gestures to extremes that i never used to!

Hell even just trying to figure out how to take features and details from characters in something and translate them into YOUR style can be a big learning and growing experience. (u can see in my old art it took me a while to get rick to look right)

So i guess the overall is that seeking out and consuming media is always important bc you can take a lot of inspiration from something without even realizing it. (honestly if ur feeling stagnant in ur art watching/reading something new can be a good way to jog ur brain). And taking a good look at the art you enjoy and trying to figure out WHY u like it, and what elements are stick out to u. Then seeing if you can bring those elements into ur own art and see if it's successful to u to explore it.

as far as voice goes um.... i guess what's become important to me is that u gotta know when to cut corners lol. like a hand doesn't ALWAYS need to be perfectly formed, like it can be a squiggle and it might even look better for it. sometimes loose and sloppy looks good for what ur doing and sometimes heavily defined and carefully lined work is necessary but i gotta remember that the clean art is built on the back of the sloppy studies. and stray lines, warped perspective, and unaligned facial elements can give a lot of character to a work that might otherwise seem bland and stiff.

thank you so much for the question it was fun to take a look at my work and reflect on how i got to what i have as a style now! R&M has honestly done A TON for my art style and drawing abilities that i didn't realize till now.

Also worth mentioning bc i forget how much of my life i share w/ you guys but i also have BFA in Illustration with a focus in Animation Arts and Sequential Art.