#i wanted to do a proper painting but i've been really zoned out lately so. yeah. old men i GUESS

[seagiri]

what the fuck is happening in the dungeon

[comicaurora]

Hiya Red! I love your art; it's so bouncy and simple and fun to look at while still having the details and structure to look really cool. I've been drawing more lately and I was curious if you've ever had any style envy. I'm pleased with what my style looks like and it's still trying to settle, but sometimes I look through other people's art and think "man, I wish I could do that." I try to approach it as things to learn from by seeing what aspects I like, but I struggle to work through it alot.

I’ve definitely experienced that! Moreso when I was younger and a lot worse at art - I’d see people’s style and try to emulate it, failing because I didn’t have the base level of technical skill to produce the effect I wanted. That frustration drove a lot of my artistic development. It’s lessened as I became more comfortable with my own style - to an extent. The last time I experienced style envy, I was watching Howl’s Moving Castle and it was a bad scene. The characters were fine, well within my comfort zone, but the backgrounds physically hurt me. I’ve specialized in lineart and crisp cell-shading - proper painting has evaded me, and painted backgrounds with that degree of complexity were on a whole other level. I look at the cell-shading tricks I’ve developed to make halfway decent foliage in my comic backgrounds, I look at what Studio Ghibli does for every single shot, and I weep internally that I’ll never have the attention span to do what they do.

Fucking hell. Unnecessary, that’s what that is. That shot is less than ten seconds long.

I think ultimately style envy comes from the feeling of “I couldn’t do that”, and that feeling lessens the more art you do. Regardless of your personal style of choice, there’s a base technical skillset in all visual art that boils down to “how effectively can you put what you’re envisioning down on the page”. Even if someone’s art style is very different from your own, you can still look at it and see how they did it. Seeing art from this analytical perspective sidesteps the envy and goes straight into practicality - what are they doing, what can I learn from this, how could I make this work for how I work? Why couldn’t I do that? What do I need to learn to become capable of doing that?

Right now most of my personal style envy flareups come from visual complexity. Ghibli movies make incredibly complex, vibrant background shots that are then never reused, and I look at that and think “I couldn’t do that” - not because I couldn’t physically paint it (although I couldn’t, I can’t paint for beans) but because I literally couldn’t force my brain to make such a detailed image with so little payoff. The ADHD brain gremlins would complain nonstop. I can draw complex character poses all the livelong day, but static environments are like kryptonite. When I see something that does them really well, I get that envy pang because no matter how technically skilled I become, I won’t be able to do anything like that. (Or will I? As I get faster, complex art seems to bore me less, so maybe I’ll become more comfortable with ludicrously complex environments - or maybe I’ll figure out more shortcuts to produce the illusion of complexity with minimal work)

Style envy is a legitimately useful impulse if you can identify what, specifically, is provoking it. Is it the crispness of the lineart? You might need to build up some muscle memory so your own lines become smoother and more confident. Is it the vibrant colors? You might wanna play around with highlights and shading to get a feel for that kind of visual flair. Intricate shading? Might need to familiarize yourself with how light interacts with 3D objects. The thing that pings the envy is usually the thing your brain wants to get better at - it’s just a matter of figuring out what that is.