#how different would my art look if I'd gotten into adventure time instead

[moonybadger]

Been trying to watch Adventure Time finally since I loved Fionna and Cake so much and man. I can really tell why I didn't get into it back in high school lol

[oliveroctavius]

What inspires your art? Like, how did you come up with your art style, how happy you are with it and if there are any other artists that inspire you?

Asking a few people as a way to understand and grow as an artist at a crossroads. Have a good day.

This is a fun ask! Not sure how helpful my answers will be to you, but here they are.

I've honestly put little to no thought into "coming up with" an art style. I'd say that what comes out of my brain and hands is maybe only 1/3 calculated stylistic decisions, with the rest being "what is most fun for me" and "what is easiest for me". I draw a lot of faces because I enjoy caricature; I do most of it in scribbly mechanical pencil on scrap paper because that's what I usually have on hand.

My one big starting point is that when I started drawing at age ~12, I was copying characters out of The Adventures of Tintin. I learned just enough from Hergé to get simplified human figures I didn't hate and then went iteratively on from there. Mostly I just drew short humorous fancomics for myself and never colored them.

In high school I considered going into an art career, so I took art classes. At the time I thought they were fun but mostly irrelevant to the stylized character art I drew in my class notes every day... but looking back my comic art drastically improved 2015-17, so maybe I was wrong. I eventually decided I'd go into tech instead and leave dressing as a hobby, which I think was the right choice for me.

The closest I've ever had to a Style was in the music fanart and OC comics I did in college. The imagery mostly came out of my own brain, and I worked out what tools were easiest and most enjoyable: multicolor sharpie pens and India ink with watercolor washes; binary or hard edged brushes on digital work that I could fill in quickly with the bucket tool. I accepted that I wasn't a great draftsman and got scribblier and more manic.

Since then I've gotten back to the world of fancomics where I try to pastiche the original inking style—I've done Jhonen Vasquez, Steve Purcell, John Romita, Jack Cole, Scott Wegener, and C. C. Beck (though that one was way too ambitious and I may never finish). But I'm not doing this because I want to absorb them into my default style, though I certainly learn things from it. I do it for the project itself, because I feel like there's a lot of characterization and world-rules built into the way different art styles depict their worlds. I have great interest in stories which use restricted or contrasting stylization on purpose to convey meaning.

It's also just fun, which is my first priority. But I do think my technical skills have been regressing a bit from lack of use + perhaps from using others' work as a crutch too often. It's a little embarrassing, but it is what it is. I'm sure the trend will reverse if/when I put more time into full pieces and daily practice again.

Oh, and I did make a list of favorite artists back in 2018 which holds up. If I had to extract some advice from this meandering post, it would be to figure out what methods and tools make your artistic workflow easier and consider how you want to make those part of your "style". That's extra true if this is something you're going to be doing for long periods of time like a job.