#going thru my old sketchbooks and having a whiplash of cringe at the fanart i did to a ytber that got exposed as a groomer last year

[rui-drawsbox]

hey dude

how did you develop your art style? ive been drawing for years and I cant seem to get a handle on ANYTHING

4 almost 5 days late sorry dude you shot right into my inability to put thoughts into words properly HAHA

alright so first of all, i don't even think a style is something you need to do art. I'm a hobbyist apologist and as long those people enjoy creating it doesn't even have to look "good".

That aside i'm assuming you want to take art at least a little seriously so i'm just going to be straight forward and say that the only way is ping-pong between styles/techniques/themes and just stick with the stuff you feel more comfortable doing.

Now going into my personal experience, that's what you asked after all lolol (from now on this is just yapping so feel free to ignore it)

alr soooo im skipping my first steps into art and going into the humanoid phase. I actually started with sonic! Specifically the show Sonic X, of course i picked up mannerisms from the anime when it was time of doing comedic doodles (and cuestionable taste on fashion)

(im going thru my big inspirations so bear with me here)

2015 came and i discovered my two main inspirations for a long time: fnaf and Ed00chan! (link to her abandoned deviantart so yall can see the style of the time). As i was completely enamored by her anime-yet-cartoony style i was also hyperfixated with fnaf and those two things combined perfectly into (the infamous in the spanish side of the fnaf fandom) fnafhs! bing bang boom there it goes my personality for the next 5 years!

sprinkle a few power puff girls z too why not

anyway at that time i wanted to become a pro like ed00 so i had to understand anatomy, and my go-to channel was Bgm94! But the elders said that to broke the rules you have to understand them, so i just kind-of started doing more "realistic" bodies while maintaining the cartoony-ness i liked so much. Which to be fair, didn't last long before i got bored and jumped straight into cartoon/chibi again

also since we're entering my digital era i'm including some drawings with wild style changes since the experimentation never ends owo9

anyway that was 2018 and before! it was around 2017-18 that i dropped the general tutorials and just started experimenting on my own style/anatomy and trying to improve my skills (im ignoring my sketchbooks bc from now on they just become- well, sketchbooks, instead of doing full drawings i just doodled in classes and leaved the detail for digital stuff)

i would love to include all my 2019 folder bc i consider it was a year full of love for my silly doodles but tumblr has a limit for images HAHA. Hopefully you can see how i go trying out stuff and pick little stuff from every stage with me lolol

2020 hits and you can *see* my hyperfixation with twisted wonderland here, at least my folder is 60% twst drawings i made for my fanfic at the time LOL. Not so many style jumps here tho so let's keep going

2021 and 2022 here! at the second half of 2022 i found my oh so beloved crunchy brush and i also fell hard for Arashi Narukami, so basically my tumblr became an arashi fanpage lol

stuff at 2023 keeps pretty the same until now tbh, the only highlight would be the re-inclusion of noses bc of spiderverse 2. My style also has been pretty well maintained since i started doing commissions so i don't really do so much experimentation anymore, at least not with proportions and such.

alr so that was my journey on artstyle! Of course it's not like you're gonna guess all my process just by looking at the images so i'll say what type of stuff i feel influenced my decisions.

i'm very lazy and for a log time i just abandoned my projects if it prolonged more than a day or two, that obviously made me lean into the cel/plain shading rather than spending hours and maybe days rendering (not that i don't try rendering every now and then but i don't enjoy spending so much time in a single piece)

everyone around me always has been extremely supportive so i had the privilege of dedicating all my soul to drawing silly characters haha, i feel like since i never felt the need of comparing myself to others i could actually experiment so unapologetically with my style until i was satisfied

finding an actual brush that i like is always crucial to me tbh, even in traditional i'm pretty picky with how the ink and type of pen i'm using. Of course, i also tried multiple traditional art techniques (watercolor, acrylics, crayons, pencils, pastels, my favorite are pen+markers)

i dont like feets. that shows until today.

in general i think an artstyle is something extremely personal that every person has to shape themselves and that it can't really be a permanent thing, it's gonna fluctuate with the artist whenever they like it or not.