teacher: are there any classes you are having trouble with?
me: im pretty good at most of them but im having a few problems mastering my destro warlocks priority
teacher:
me:
blizzard: Nice.
And since I”m on a style ramble, I’d like to make another point about style and techniques. It’s INCREDIBLY important to have groundbreaking artists who push the boundries and make new styles or techniques acceptable to the public.
An artist can only survive based on what the public will buy. When an artist, or group of artists, start a new movement into what’s ‘desired’ by the public, they open the doors for countless others who prefer to express themselves with similar techniques as well, but haven’t been able to get jobs because it’s not the ‘in’ thing right now. A good example of this is in the cover art industry. For the longest time the ONLY way to be a cover artist was to be an oil painter. If you were digital you were a hack, and terrible. But those in the digital community kept pushing and expressing themselves, and eventually have broken through to where digital art in a WIDE variety of styles is now highly sought after. Those artists who share that skillset are now able to get work more easily than before.
This can happen in large scale with entire artistic movements, or in small scale of one artist to another.
I personally would not be the artist I am today if my mentor, Mike Dringenberg, had not walked before me with his work with neil-gaiman on the sandman comics, his many, many book covers, and his work on things like Tori Amos’ calendar. He opened the door for me to be able to work with Garth Nix on some of his books, and be able to work for Baen with their magazines for several years *despite* being a watercolor artist. During a time when I was giving up because I was told that “digital is all anyone is hiring”, Mike took me to his studio and spent HOURS teaching me watercolor techniques, linework, inkwork, composition, anatomy, color theory and discussing the various art movements and how they affect the way you use your tools to create a mood or a feel in your art.
The artists who come before you are the ones who can show you the lessons they’ve learned, and from there you can leap off and try even new, crazy things. And who knows, maybe even start an art movement of your own.
a lot of the art styles i’ve seen for wow commissions are looking an awful lot like Whinecraft’s style…. hmmmm
If you want to call someone out, you should call them out, and not vaguepost like this.
I don’t know if…
Take some art history classes about the way art changes over the years. It’s kind of interesting, and might help you learn more about how art and inspiration works. There’s a reason art is grouped by stylistic movements. Impressionism, expressionism, romanticism, the danish golden age, modernism, surrealism, post modern art, neo-classicism, fauvism, cubism, art neauvou, art deco, abstract, kinetic, baroque, dada, folk art, harlem rennaissance, rococo, etc. etc. etc. There are literally thousands of artistic movements.
What these are, are an infusion of a new style, a new technique and a new way of thinking into the artistic community. It spreads like fire through the artists and creates a ‘movement’ of a particular type of style. The easiest example of Art Nouveau. You see that style EVERYWHERE, it’s influenced damn near every artist you see. It’s also widely accepted that Alphonse Mucha is the ‘father’ of the Nouveau movement, pushing that style into the public’s acceptance and making it something that people enjoy and want to see more of. Paving the way for other artists to utilize those techniques in their works as well.
Monet is seen as the father of impressionism, and many incredible works came from the movement he spawned.
There’s an entire movie based on the life of Georges Seurat, who created pointilism and founded the neo-impressionism movement. I highly reccommend you watch the movie, it’s called Sunday in the Park with George adn it’s really wonderful.
The point I’m making is.. educate yourself people. Artists are an incestuous lot when it comes to creation, with lots of borrowing concepts and styles, techniques and tools from one another. Where the problem comes in is when people *literally take the work itself* and pass it off as their own.
And for budding artists. Don’t worry about mastering your own style. It will come in time, particularly with education. You’ll learn how you prefer to handle lines. Do you like the more illustrative work? Or do you prefer realism? Pointilism? How do you shade? Do you exagerate your figures, or do you chose to be as precise as possible? There are countless variables that go into what ‘style’ is, and the only way to develope a style is to learn about as many techniques and ways of using your tools as possible, and let your heart guide you into what feels the most comfortable.
… sorry to ramble. I’m an old lady who hates to see things like this pop up over and over again. FOR FUCKS SAKE TAKE ART HISTORY IT ACTUALLY HAS PURPOSE.
Sometimes I’m thankful that Mo turned out to be the sweet, kind, loving person she is today. But then there are days I wish she were this badass. Just a quick little sketch I did to experiment with a different hairstyle that I had picked out for Mo a long time ago. This is not Mo’s hair now, I swear.
Real talk here, though. Look at how much better the top one is.
