Developing Your Own Style
Submitted by Sean C on April 3, 2006 - 12:50
I felt like writing this blog after changing the art style to my comic, and realizing what a liberating experience it can be. I had been drawing Cute Ninja Girls in a more manga-esque style since it's launch, but faced a bit of an ethical crisis. I'm no fan of manga, and view it as derivative and hack, (this is mostly on the web, but it's not universal by any means) yet here I was drawing my own comic in this style.
I know the kind of art I like to draw, and I know that my personal style would be both easier to handle and would help make the comic itself more original than it already was. I had been using the manga style because the comic originally called for it, and would be an important part of establishing the "cute" factor of Cute Ninja Girls. I couldn't take it anymore.
One day, I said to hell with it, and went for it. It was the best move I could have made. Now, I'm afraid, I'm going to rant for a bit. I'm not trying to be harsh, or single anyone out; I'm just speaking from experince.
Alright, folks. I've been reading webcomics for years, and drawing/writing one for roughly half a year now. I've experienced the occasionally intense pressure of crafting a unique art style that I can call my own. Of course doing something like this involves studying other artists, and discovering little tricks they use that may work for your own style. Every artist has been influenced by other artists, so don't deny it. Even when I worked in my manga-esque style, I tried to make it different than the general crop out there.
However, I'm seeing a trend developing that disturbs me - there's a definite pattern of new artists seeking to directly copy the style of another webcomic artist. These individuals, God bless 'em, have the idea that by closely copying another artist, they can have a successful comic. They occasionally will simply try to copy an image from another artist's comic panels. I've seen cases where developing artists actually ask (ususally in forums) how to copy an artist, or ask how to draw like artist X. It saddens me that they don't aim for a more unique and personal style. It's a wonderful experience to do so.There are some areas that get hit hard by this particular type of art parasite.
Manga - It's everywhere - both in print and online. If the story to Manga X isn't as cliched as possible, then the art is exceptionally derivative of another artist. I'm not accusing manga artists in general - there's plenty of truly original people in this genre, but there are those that push things too far, in my book. These are the self-indulgent fan-fics that copy the art as closely as they can for an "authentic" feel. There are those who just draw manga characters because they think they could get more traffic. (I can be accused of this - but I defend myself by stating that when the comic originally launched, it was meant to have a manga flavor - the style was not just some trick to get readers - and I abandoned the manga-esque style, admiting I couldn't stand it anymore.) There are the artists who believe that manga is a good area to learn how to draw, and try to do so without studying important details like anatomy. Their characters tend to be highly disproportional, have narrow heads, and lean to one side. They're cutting corners, and it shows.
Furry - I know furry fans are some of the most passionate and rabid fans, but I gotta say it: pretty much all furry comics look alike. There's a general style used across the vast majority of the board; simply read a few and you'll see what I mean. The "talented" furry artists tend to have some sort of canine character that looks like every other canine character. There are details that are prevailent - the general shape of the head, the brow, and the placement of the ears. Don't get me started on the whole cat-girl thing, either. I don't even know if it belongs in this genre, but the world has seen every possible cat-girl it could ever see. We don't want anymore images of a sexy girl with cat ears coming out of the top of her head.
Sprites - There are pixel artists who make their own sprites, and I give credit to them. However, the majority of sprite comics are taken from old videogames, and the lack of effort shows, mostly through the poor jokes, "anytime I feel like it" updates, and piss-poor panel arrangement. Sprite comics tend to be for people who just want to say, "I have a webcomic." If you want that as a status symbol, put a little more effort into it. Some have found success, like 8-Bit Theater, but that comic stands on good writing, and the panels are carefully planned.
For any artists out there who are considering starting up a webcomic, I can only offer the following advice. Don't copy another artist's style. Ever. It's okay to borrow elements to enhance your own style; that's how you develop it. Ripping off another artist WILL draw harsh comparisons, and will be viewed as derivative and possibly hack-work. Before you even start the first strip, make up character sheets that show your character from various angles. See what you can do to make yourself more comfortable drawing said characters. Don't claim that copying another artist directly helps you learn to draw, because it doesn't. All it teaches you is how another artist draws. You won't walk away with a better sense of the figure, and the overall quality of your work will suffer. If you can't handle the basics like figure drawing, then you may want to consider learning a bit more before making the commitment to a comic. Waiting just a little longer can be a boon. If you do just jump in, you'll find that your art improves over time, especially if you make the effort to make it better. Either approach is valid.
I'm not trying to be elitist, or to discourage future webcomic makers; I'm just trying to give out advice. Developing your own, original art style will help define your individualty and, who knows, maybe you'll strike gold and create the new "hip" style that will trigger a wave of copy-cats. Your chances of success through ripping off another artist aren't good. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but in the comics world, it's generally frowned upon. If I came off harsh or offended anyone, then I apologize. I only want to encourage budding artists to define themselves, and create something they can truly call their own.
I'm hypersensitive to pattern
by Aleph - 04/06/2006 - 11:55
That actually is the way I'm wired, no problem admitting it. Patterns mean more to me than they do to most people. You tend to jump in replying to my posts with this reminder to be civil, and I have a track record here of being civil, not only with people who disagree with me, but with people who mistreat me, I was even civil when my stalker showed up here.
I have a three year history of rejecting the drama llama, and I wasn't always lurking during that time either, this is just the first year I've made a commitment not to reject the community at large and to try to meet it on its terms-- since members of it met me on mine and helped me out, giving me a reason to push myself to try to meet them on equal footing. So try to take that into account if you could, and I'll try to remember that you don't mean it to seem like hopping in to stop me from challenging others' statements more than most people would.
I think taking a single
by rezo - 04/05/2006 - 15:50
I think taking a single figure and making him the sole reference point for the styles that developed over time is just lazy. Look at japanese comics before his time, and various approaches to illustration and you'll see that the conventions did not just pop up suddenly with Tezuka, nor is all manga made in his hayday reminiscent of his approach. There are also the illustrators that created stories for kami-shibai and adapted them to comics in when the popularity declined. Certainly they were influenced by the art of their contemporaries, but they had likely developed their approach before Tezuka had any fame, and for whatever similarities you can find in their work, it could hardly be said they were derivative.
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Very good point
by jsandas - 04/04/2006 - 18:16
Many of the things I would consider typical for manga – clean line art, little variation in line weight, defining shapes with simple outlines and so on* – have more to do with the production process than with anything else. Both the economical demand to produce lots of pages quickly and the technical demand that these pages must be suitable for black and white printing on rather cheap paper must affect the "style" a lot before the individual artist even comes into the process.
*And I'm sure somebody who knows more about these things than I do could point out lots and lots of Japanese comics that don't share these traits (oh no, it's only my third post here and I'm using footnotes already).
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Unreal City, a Graphic Novel.
Good points, Andrael. As I
by Sean C - 04/04/2006 - 08:31
Good points, Andrael. As I mentioned before, artists can borrow certain elements from another artist's style (like the way Artist X draws eyes, or a thicker outline to figures, etc...)
Developing your own, unique style is time-consuming, but shouldn't that be the goal for any artist - to develop and better yourself, rather than seek out a cheap, quick and easy way? Doesn't the real artist take pride in their gift, and try to cultivate it? A lot of artists do copy early on, but tend to realize that directly copying another artist isn't working for them, and they move to learning basic anatomy, and look for a drawing style they are more comfortable with, thus developing as an artist. However, artists who adhere to copying can "derail" their development the longer they stay with that tactic.
I'm not encouraging artists to try to make something totally different than what's out there. There's no reason an artist couldn't draw in the manga style, but if an artist just copies the styles used in Applegeeks or Inuyasha, then all they're doing is copying. Those are styles that are comfrotable for the artists who developed those them. It's very likely (and usually true) that copying those styles would be difficult. The "copying artist" could very likely draw in a manga style, but, on their own, might draw the eyes differently, or structure the figures in a different manner. Those differences would be what makes that artist unique, even though they happen to be drawing in the manga style. There's no reason not to draw in a style that's popular, but every artist has their own idioyncrasies that manifest in their art. That's what defines them, and that's what makes them unique.
Don't hesitate to procrastinate.
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Don't hesitate to procrastinate. My brand new comic: http://cain.bombsheltercomics.com
Deliberately trying to draw
by andrael - 04/04/2006 - 05:40
Deliberately trying to draw a certain way because it's different from what's popular is, to my mind, not ideologically different from deliberately drawing a certain way because it's similar to what's popular.
I dunno, I just think that individual style is something that's likely to come from gradual evolution and artistic development rather than sitting down and going, "I must develop a unique style!! I must I must I must!!!" Of course, making effort to learn basic stuff like anatomy, perspective, etc. etc. can never hurt either.
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No Rest For The Wicked
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Anti-conformity is conformity too
by Aleph - 04/04/2006 - 09:32
Certainly I agree, and from personal experience, trying to torture your own style into something else-- no matter what the aim-- is going to turn into bad art. When I started I was trying to 'toon up' what was really a painting based style more than what I thought of as a comic style, and it just ended up awful. The moment I gave myself permission to just relax and not try to exagerrate things/distort them everything smoothed out significantly.
Trying to just 'be different', whether it's trying to be different from what you see or different from what you really are and think people won't welcome, is a distortion that doesn't really benefit anyone, I think it's a better goal for people to start with what's comfortable and just keep pushing and pushing at what appeals to them until they find things that make them happy as artists.
Besides, when you puff yourself up thinking you're all revolutionary and different, you still risk finding out you're far from first to the table. It's a vast wide world out there, and it's hard rebel so very well that you guarantee nobody will be doing the same thing you are, and doing it better. Irony is fun.
Most people learn to draw by reproducing, and for some reason people think it's a higher goal to try to reproduce life than to reproduce another's interpretation of life. Art is a symbolic language, though, not an entirely representational one-- so learning from how another person interprets it is to me a higher goal, not a lesser one. The difference between learning from another artist and aping the artist tends to go to whether or not the person learning bothers to try to figure out /why/ the art looks the way it does, as opposed to being satisfied with copying it reasonably well. It sucks that a lot of people stop with copying and don't ever put themselves into the work, but telling people, never copy ever, I think that's actually counterproductive to their developing their own voice because it tells them to shut up until they already have it. I think a better rule that got lost here is just, never rip off another artist, don't take their work and just modify it for your own goals. Mimicry is a much higher form of flattery than flat-out use of someone else's images.
The best way to go, really, is just to start doing what pleases your eye, and then keep trying to make it better and better to you. I'll take something that's only a few degrees off something else before I'll take the pretentious, tedious, and BORING that comes of making an identity out of rejecting all things that came before, and we've all seen projects like that. I think the proposed position falls somewhere in between but it makes a lot of assumptions and generalizations that lay inappropriate blame and dilute the message.
This isn't nearly confined to manga and furry, nor sprite, I think these are just three categories of comic art that irritate the original poster. Wannabes abound in just about every category, from PA clones to pages that could have been ripped directly out of Marvel and run through a colour filter, practically. 'comic book' may not be a style, nor 'manga' nor 'webcomic', but, there are prevalent ideas that people have come to expect under those labels and I think that's where the bias has gone here.
You said it a lot better, Andrael, that's just my wordy wordy agreement ^^; Thumbs-up :)
Copying another artist's
by Brad Hawkins - 04/04/2006 - 00:52
Copying another artist's style is certainly not a situation you want to find yourself in after several years, but it is how most artists start out. Name any comics artist - odds are good they started out copying someone else. There's nothing at all shameful about it. It's a good way to get the basics of draftsmanship down. your own style will come later, or it should.
Oh, and to those who claim that manga isn't a style. This may be the case... it may be many, many different styles. Many, many different styles that all look the damn same. :)
Oh, and to those who claim
by andrael - 04/04/2006 - 05:09
Oh, and to those who claim that manga isn't a style. This may be the case... it may be many, many different styles. Many, many different styles that all look the damn same. :)
Before I started reading superhero comics, I thought that Jim Lee, John Romita Jr., Chris Bachalo and Andy Kubert's art all looked "the damn same". Just because certain people can't seem to distinguish between Arina Tanemura and Katsuhiro Otomo doesn't mean they are indistinguishable.
In my mind, there is a difference between "coming from an identifiable artistic background" and "all looking the damn same". I mean, Disney cartoons are recognizable as Disney cartoons, but you couldn't tell me that the art in Lilo and Stitch looks the same as the art in Sleeping Beauty.
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No Rest For The Wicked
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I think people are too
by rezo - 04/04/2006 - 00:40
I think people are too concerned about finding an individual style. The most common reason a style is seen as unique is because the person looking at it is ignorant of what it is similar to, or they overlook the similarities because they like it, and saying it's not particularly unique is seen as a bad thing. And then they'll see a thumbnail of a face from another strip and write it off as hackery. Or they compare themselves to very dissimilar works - so a comic stands out because it is "not a manga or gamer comic", but it's probably something else quite similar to a lot of other "not manga/gamer" comics. There are seven fairly obviously manga/anime influenced comics in the buzzcomix top ten. None of them look like they're using the same style. None of them look like something you'd expect the average webcomic reader to be unfamiliar with visually. That is the way it is for most comics out there. None of the art from people who have responded to this post stand out in any big way, myself included. It's the same with a lot of comics influenced by strips. With their squat deformed characters and common expressions.At the same time, it wouldn't be said that Family Guy, The Simpsons, Futurama, Flinstones and The Critic all had the same style, although as far as indicating a general approach they aren't much different than the degrees of difference between many manga. in general An artist's individuality tends to show itself in their slight personal deviations from common approaches. This is why someone can say that Hawk's anime influenced deformed characters constitute a unique voice. And I think it's silly the way people who are in no way exceptional can slam their peers so blithely for being normal.
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Re: I think people are too
by andrael - 04/04/2006 - 05:17
[quote=rezo]The most common reason a style is seen as unique is because the person looking at it is ignorant of what it is similar to, or they overlook the similarities because they like it,
[/quote]
Right. Or else it's similar to something that's copied far less often than something else that's copied a lot, and is thus seen as "less derivative".
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No Rest For The Wicked
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Ghastly beat me to it again.
by Greg Carter - 04/04/2006 - 00:12
Ghastly beat me to it again. Manga isn't about the art it's about the storytelling. The reason why most attempts at comics that use what's become known in the US as the anime/manga art style is because they don't get it. They're basically making fan art. Like Aleph said, something for the group mind to "glomp". Like Kiba said, 90% of everything is crap and since there's a lot of stuff drawn in that style it looks like there is a huge amount of bad manga. When really, it's not manga. It's just bad comics drawn to look like most anime.
I said I wasn't taking the bait this time, but I did anyway. I'm really tired of defending manga. Actually I don't give a rat's ass about manga itself, I'm defending my manga-style comic from being lumped in with the rest. But I just realized I don't need to worry. It stands on it's own. And calling my comic "manga" under the popular US definition is about as accurate as calling it a "vampire" comic.
So "half a year" of attempting to work in a manga-style taught you this, huh? Maybe manga is actually a lot harder and way more complicated than you think. And that's why so many people do it so badly.
Greg Carter
Abandon
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"Manga" isn't a style
by Uncle Ghastly - 04/03/2006 - 23:52
"Manga" isn't a style anymore than "comics" is a style.
Individualism versus copying
by Neil Cohn - 04/03/2006 - 21:57
I think this is one of the most interesting topics of "comic theory" research for me – the debate between communal styles and individualism. If anyone is interested in a deconstructive viewpoint of these trends, I wrote a piece for comixpedia about this two years ago...
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------- Studying the Visual Language of "Comics" - http://www.emaki.net
Style, substance, and shiny eyes
by Aleph - 04/03/2006 - 19:51
Manga-- as a broad sweeping generalization, not as a 100 percent rule-- often develops an instant, irrational following regardless of content because of a sense of familiarity. This is how something like Return The Favor! can become a phenomenon with 7 pages and no plotline, etc etc etc ad infinitum. If you look at cross-listed sites like Onlinecomics.net you can see that manga fans tend to glom on to hundreds of manga bridging all kinds of genre and styles, pretty much attaching to anything with shiny eyes. On its surface, manga promise formula, characters whose roles and primary traits can often be identified on first glance based on model style, eye style, and costume. Manga revolves around several sets of feel-good concepts, whether it's the hamsters with sparkly twinkles feel good or the sexy robots feel good or the 'we'll be friends forever!' feel good, etc-- and you can usually identify which thing is being promised from the thumbnail that links into the site. It's very accessible, so it's not a surprise that people end up copying what they see and producing a torrent of indistinguishable comics. The closer a new artist gets to what's hot in manga, the more people will attach to the newest thing that looks like what they already can't get enough of. I agree, though, about the atrocious things it ends up doing to a person's sense of character and art. The 'how to draw' things don't help, teaching people to make little stiffly-jointed dolls and not how anything articulates or why things show weight or don't.
Furry, you're appealing to certain appetites and the people who are looking for their furry comics want specific things. They're not going to accept furries that don't look like what they expect, generally-- it's been a long time since anybody's mentioned a real development in the furry models used for furry art. Most of the furry art I hear mentioned is NSFW, and yeah, I'd like to hear less. But there are also therianthropes and people who grew up on anthropomorphic Disney dreams and they tend to revolve around things that are idealized, pleasing, and easily recognizable as the specific kinds of fantasies they entertain, so I doubt furry will change much until someone comes out with something that better tickles that predilection.
As for the rest, though, I think more and more people are trying to find their own ways... and occasionally something really good comes out of a style that at first seems derivative. Applegeeks has really gone a lot further, for instance, than anyone gave it credit for-- Hawk has his own voice. Like you, I think people often start with something familiar, especially if it gives them a better chance at starting out with a more welcoming reception, and then branch out from there. It's not actually a bad idea. Speaking from experience, when you hit people with a style that is wholly unfamiliar to their tastes, it can take a while to overcome their natural rejection of the unfamiliar. If people can't say, this looks like 'x' which is already popular, they often try to push the artist towards a familiar direction.
There really was a time when people pressured me to try drawing Malakhim in a /penny arcade/ style. I wanted to skin those people alive. It can be rough and aggravating to start out without the bonus of familiarity-- there will be a lot of sheeple who think if you aren't already popular the solution is to be like somebody who is, and will do their well-meaning best to wear you down until you change. I'd cut beginning artists slack if they weren't up to that challenge. As long as they develop their own voice as they go along, I won't necessarily put them down for starting with something that gets the proverbial foot in the door.
Some of the most successful artists in comics started out with other peoples' characters after all. Drawing them in their notebooks, I mean, not stealing-- and sometimes, continuing their storylines for one of the big publishers. This is a business that owes much of its progress to copycats.
Doesn't 90% of all comics
by Kiba - 04/03/2006 - 17:57
Doesn't 90% of all comics sucks?
This include manga, webcomics, superhero book, and whatnot.
Copying someone's style and stuff like that been around a long time.
Really, this thing has been around FOREVER. No matter what you say to them, they don't care/listen/whatnot.