cancer / intp / She/Her. I mostly just reblog homestuck,steven universe, undertale, and art, but feel free to ask anything! Icon drawn by torijingles!
Hailing from Yokohama, Japan, Takanori Aiba creates “dimensional” works of art combining his knowledge and past experience in maze illustration and architectural work. Aiba incorporates the traditional technique and aesthetic approach that is similarly found in the art of Bonsai grooming.
Source: bonsaiempire and emptykingdom
This post was originally going to be titled “what is good art”. But that, of course, is a fairly un-answerable question. There are just too many factors at play, too many legitimate answers that can easily be dissected and taken down by equally legitimate rebuttals.
This is a post about how to succeed (and by succeed I mean actually make a living) in the field of art. Much of the process of getting there is determining what IS successful, and using that information to your benefit. This whole post is just from my point of view and I’d love to hear yours at the end.
We can look at art objectively. We can say, is there a good knowledge of anatomy? Of color and light? Composition? Edge control? Storytelling? Line weight? Perspective? Contrast? Etc, etc etc, every foundational skill that’s hammered at in art school.
And there’s definitely legitimacy to this approach! If there’s an obvious deficiency in any of these foundational skills, the art will suffer.
But art can be totally lacking in many of these areas and still succeed.
I usually call this the “appeal” factor. Appeal is extremely hard to define.
I’ll make an example out of a piece of abstract art. Sesame, Helen Frankenthaler
Is this good art?
Some simply will not like it. Others dislike it (or are neutral) but can explain the objective qualities of it (composition, color, texture, line shape and edge control, etc). But there are people who have no knowledge of any of these properties of art who still like it! Why? Because it appeals to them.
Different aspects of art will appeal to different people. My professors from time at art school are an excellent example. If I made a slideshow of every piece of art I’ve made in the last 5 years, I can almost guarantee that every teacher would pick a (most likely vastly) different favorite piece.
My character design teacher likes simplified art with an emphasis on shape language. (Below; my work from his class.)
My oil painting teacher was not a fan of that style in the least! He’d pick a well-executed oil-painted orb over a cartoon any day. He appreciated abstract oil painted works with graphic, bold color choices. (Below; my work from his class.)
And I don’t think either of them would particularly like this…
…despite it being one of my most successful pieces! Surely they’d look at it objectively and give me a pat on the back for the execution, but if they were putting together a list of my works that appealed to each of them most, neither would likely choose it.
So what does this mean for us, as artists? If even other ARTISTS would have such radically varying opinions?
1) SUCCESSFUL ART LOOKS DIFFERENT IN DIFFERENT FIELDS
This is a gorgeous painting by Edgar Degas, and is certainly at home in a fine art gallery. It’s an incredibly successful piece by a fantastic artist. But if somehow (ignoring all logic) he turned it in as a portfolio piece for position as a character designer on, say, Gravity Falls…
…he’d be met with some confusion! It’s an incredible painting, but for a TV cartoon it doesn’t display the practical skill-set needed for the job. The same logic applies that this model sheet by my talented character design teacher Joe Pitt…
…would NOT be accepted into a fine art gallery! And certainly, fine art snobs may even turn their nose up at it! But for a TV cartoon character model sheet, it is extremely successful. To those who find this type of art appealing it’s a home run.
And you may not even consider how specific these categorizations get. The above model sheet is very appropriate for a TV cartoon, but likely wouldn’t be for, say, a computer animated feature film like Big Hero Six.
Shiyoon Kim’s incredible Hiro drawings knock it out of the park in the field of feature film character design, but again, wouldn’t be found in a fine art gallery. (And would need to be simplified immensely to work for most TV cartoons!)
What does this mean for you? It means KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE. Put together a portfolio that SUITS the job, and don’t expect a job to come along that suits your existing portfolio; it may, but then again, it may not. If you want to guarantee work, it often means designing your portfolio for success. RESEARCH what factors make something successful in your desired field.
If don’t want to do this, or don’t wish to work in-house in an existing position, or want to play the convention artist alley game or something similar…
2) TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE APPEAL FACTOR- the trends are different depending on the situation!
People buy art that appeals to them. Also, people share art that appeals to them, and more shares = more buys in the long run.
I see so many posts along the lines of:
Popular artist: *makes something simple that looks like it took 10 min* 10,000 NOTES!!
Me: *spends 30 hours on a painting* 18 notes…….
And I understand the struggle. I really do; seriously. But we have to examine the factors at play here. And we have to rid ourselves of the idea that more detailed = better. Because often (not always), ESPECIALLY on tumblr, on twitter, on instagram, and at artist alleys at conventions, simple art with a high appeal factor is what succeeds.
For example; Omocat. Hugely successful artist online and at conventions, with very simple but extremely graphically and visually appealing art. Now has a clothing line!
It’s simple, yes, but based on the hundreds of congoers constantly swarming omocat’s booth at every convention, it’s winning in the appeal factor. Omocat’s art is bright (neon even), colorful, psychedelic, cute and creepy at the same time, and simple enough to be graphic and recognizable from a distance.
Side note; all simple/graphic art is not created equal. Simplifying is an art on its own. Creating something that’s simple and still extremely appealing is HARD. There’s a reason that this old (shoddy) attempt at “chibi anime” style art by me…
Fails compared to this awesome, adorable piece by Kiwibon:
I don’t want you to get the idea that appeal is confined to cutesy, colorful, cartoon/anime art, because it isn’t. Appeal is NEVER confined to a single category, and I GUARANTEE that many of the people who read this won’t agree that some of my examples are appealing; but that’s just the nature of such a slippery concept. It can’t be pinned down. All we have are overall trends.
Take J! http://commissionsbyj.tumblr.com
Graphic, surreal, highly appealing, and extremely successful.
Both artworks above by J.
I’ll elaborate on the detailed =/= better concept with this example, a piece that took me under 2 hours:
…has nearly ten times the notes of this piece, which took me close to 20 hours.
The second piece KILLS the first one in terms of time, effort, detail, and artistic principles. But clearly, based on popularity, the first is KILLING in the appeal category! The first piece is bright, colorful, simple, graphic, cute, and is of subject matter that’s popular (shiba inu/doge) and therefore is highly shareable.
But don’t get me wrong; yes, detailed =/= better.
But simple = better is not accurate either!
This third piece blows BOTH of those pieces out of the water in terms of popularity!
And if you ask me why, I can guess, but I can’t define it exactly! That’s why the appeal factor is SO HARD to describe! It is SO SUBJECTIVE! But trends don’t lie, and this piece of mine above is one of my most popular paintings to date. What’s appealing? Is it the bright colors, and the graphic nature combined with the high level of detail?
After all, there are many artists with highly detailed art that still maintain a top notch level of appeal! Like Rudy Siswanto:
All we can really do is…
3) FIND SUCCESSFUL ARTISTS DOING THE KIND OF ART YOU WANT TO DO, AND CHART TRENDS!
In every field, at every level of detail, from anime conventions to sci-fi conventions to fine art galleries to graphic novels to concept art, there are immensely popular artists who are KILLIN IT at what they do. Figure out why.
Determine everything they’re doing from personality to upload schedule to platforms to art style. Are they making fanart that’s succeeding in a particular fandom? Are they offering a highly desired product like Sakimichan’s Patreon setup (which is currently making $25,000 per session)?
If you want to succeed at this internet art game–and work for yourself instead of a company–this is your homework! It’s what I’ve been attempting to work on for months. And I think I’m getting somewhere. Please let me know your thoughts. And of course, EVERYTHING I’ve said in this post is entirely my opinion and you can disagree with anything you wish to!
Please do keep the dialogue going if you have anything to say. I’m very interested to hear.
Drawing Tutorials
Special thanks to Bakura for already compiling loads of these.
So yeah basically I want to improve my own art so I decided to compile a list of sweet art tutorials and useful references to help me learn and I though that some of these will probably be useful to some of you guys too. It’s taken me like 3 days to compile this so far and I intend to make one of 3D art tutorials as well so stay tuned!
Also it’s labelled and sorted alphabetically woo!
I’m sure I’m not the only one…
Removing lines from a bg layer
Removing sketch from line art in SAI
Removing sketch from line art in PS
Go forth and be less frustrated :D
How to save a life. Bless you @skidar
Feel that your drawings are stagnating? Maybe there’s something missing? For those struggling with their styles and finding inspiration, this might be the thing for you!
_________
The “How to Make Your Art Look Nice” Series
Lighting | Flow and Rhythm | Thumbnailing | Mindsets | Reference and Style | Color Harmony | Contrast
Hey, the @theoverobserver, I found something else that might help answer your style ask! ( New followers, you can read the rest of the answer here! )
Anonymous asked:
fruitegg answered:
sorry im not quite sure what you mean but im assuming youre talking about the rainbow shit
i dont know all the art terms so bear with me
to add to this post, i start by just putting some random colours down then blending them out. for trolls i use lots of green blue and purple cos i guess my ocular cones n rods tell me cool colours are closer to grey than warm ones are
then i pick a colour for the high points and blend out with adjacent colours to get that rainbow effect
yellow is a good colour cos you can blend from yellow to red or yellow to blue and it will look nice + allow you to include lots of different colours which adds to the holographic/iridescent/whatever effect and still give an impression of depth without having to add heaps of black and muddying up the colours
you dont have to use yellow though, i just reckon its the easiest jumping off point. below i just changed the hue in photoshop n got cyan. it still looks like its got depth and all that but now are colours are limited, we missing yellow and orange. try different shit out though. pink is nice too
these are like fairly bad pics but below are some ways to do this with yellow as the colour of your high point/bits where the most light is bouncing off
think of the arrow going from the highest to lowest points. i like doing it the way i have in the middle pic cos i reckon its a bit more fun and dynamic. but yeah dont limit yourself to yellow! plenty of other colours out there in the big wide world. and dont worry if it looks garish you can always edit it later on
anyway you dont have to think too long and hard about like colour order or anything though. the main thing is just putting the right colours next to one another, so if youve got a green patch and a red patch blend them together with some yellow, orange/red goes between yellow and purple, etc etc
sometimes its better not to plan things too much
yo here’s a useful tip from your fellow art ho cynellis… use google sketchup to create a model of the room/building/town you’re trying to draw… then take a screenshot & use it as a reference! It’s simple & fun!
Sketchup is incredibly helpful. I can’t recommend it enough.
There’s a 3D model warehouse where you can download all kinds of stuff so you don’t have to build everything from scratch.
reblog to save a life
This is an incomplete tutorial, and it drives me crazy every time I see it come around.
We live in a pretty great digital age and we have access to a ton of amazing tools that artists in past generations couldn’t even dream of, but a lot of people look at a cool trick and only learn half of the process of using it.
Here’s the missing part of this tutorial:
How do you populate your backgrounds?
Well, here’s the answer:
If the focus is the environment, you must show a person in relation to that environment.
The examples above are great because they show how to use the software itself, but each one just kind of “plops” the character in front of their finished product with no regard of the person’s relation to their environment.
How do you fix this?
Well, here’s the simplest solution:
This is a popular trick used by professional storyboard and comic artists alike when they’re quickly planning compositions. It’s simple and it requires you to do some planning before you sit down to crank out that polished, final version of your work, but it will be the difference between a background and an environment.
From Blacksad(artist: Juanjo Guarnido)
From Hellboy (Mike
Mignola)
Even if your draftsmanship isn’t that great (like mine), people can be more immersed in the story you tell if you just make it feel like there is a world that exists completely separate from the one in which they currently reside – not just making a backdrop the characters stand in front of.
Your creations live in a unique world, and it is as much a character as any other member of the cast. Make it as believable as they are.
Great comments and tutorials!
I’m a 3d artist and have been exploring the possibilities of using 3d as reference for 2d poses. I want to add a couple of tips and things!
Sketchup is very useful for environment references, and I assume it’s reasonably easy to learn. If you’re interested in going above and beyond, I highly recommend learning a proper 3d modeling program to help with art, especially because you can very easily populate a scene or location with characters!
Using 3ds Max I can pretty quickly construct an environment for reference. But going beyond that, I can also pose a pretty simple ‘CAT’ armature (known in 3d as a rig) straight into the scene, which can be totally customized, from various limbs, tails, wings, whatever, to proportions, and also can be modeled onto and expanded upon (for an example, you could 3d sculpt a head reference for your character and then attach it to the CAT rig, so you have a reference for complex face angles!)
The armature can also be posed incredibly easily. I know programs exist for stuff like this - Manga Studio, Design Doll - but posing characters in these programs is always an exercise in frustration and very fiddly imo. A simple 3d rig is impossibly easy to pose.
By creating an environment and dropping my character rig into it, I have an excellent point of reference when it comes to drawing the scene!
Not only that, but I can also view the scene from whatever angle I could ever want or need, including the character and their pose/position relative to the environment.
We can even quickly and easily expand this scene to include more characters!
Proper 3d modeling software is immensely powerful, and if you wanted to, you could model a complex environment that occurs regularly in your comic or illustration work (say, a castle interior, or an outdoor forest environment) and populate the scene with as many perspective-grounded characters as you need!
reblogging to save a life
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Look at this amazing addition! This is fantastic!
I tried Sketchup before but did struggle a lot with it X_X Maybe I should give it another try sometime ….
ART TIPS ☝☝☝☝
thetoxicrhythm asked:
feredir answered:
Thank you!! Here’s a quick rundown haha ;;
These are the standard proportions of a human head:
When you start tweaking them you get different looking faces!
You can also take the same proportions and change the shapes of the features and get a new face as well! Amazing!
So if you want to draw your favorite characters what you can do is figure out their “facial blueprints” and reference them. Let’s draw that smarmy bastard Hannibal Lecter. Use as many lines as you need to gauge the spacial relations between each feature.
What shapes make this face uniquely Hannibal’s?
Let’s apply it all together now.
It takes practice of course but it’s a good way to study the character’s face! I hope that was somewhat helpful lol Q__Q
someone: You HAVE to style short hair.
me, with my hair sticking up in all directions like some kind of square enix protag: Interesting,
