Page 36 and Finding Your Voice

The new page is up and now I have all the original art of the pages I have published up on my deviantart page.

As you can see this blog entry is called finding your voice, and by that I don't mean your singing voice, I mean what it is that makes your drawing/paniting/illustrations uniquely yours.

When one embarks on learning how to draw, we start off by copying a lot of stuff. Some would say this is "tracing' or some would call this "using reference" but either way, we are copying another work whether it's an illustration or a photograph, and this is completely fine. Hell, there's even a "grown up" version of this called "Masters Studies" I think that asking someone to learn a skill completely in a vacuum is a very unreasonable request. Usually a reason that we peruse learning a skill like drawing is that we're inspired by the work of someone else.

Now does this make it okay to master someone else's drawing style and market it as you?... Well, I would be inclined to say no but it might bring you a little success, but I'm also willing to bet that you wouldn't want to go down as "The Poor Man's <Blank>"

So you have to branch out and experiment with other looks and styles. Surely your a fan of more than one artist or illustrator, otherwise you're a really boring person.

I guess the way to illustrate this is to go through a journey I had. Up until I was 22, i figured that I would be a pencil and ink guy and nothing more. I figured that painting was just for those people who "get it" and I wasn't one of them. Then I came across this video of Alex Ross painting a cover:

I felt like I peeked behind a magicians curtain when I saw this. "OHH! This is how he does it!" I thought to myself. Every other art lesson I had prior to this video didn't show me an organized structure to making a painting like this did. So now that I had some idea of how to approach painting, I wanted to get my hands dirty.

I decided just to try it with pictures of my friends. My first attempts didn't have the same finesse as Mr. Ross, but I was learning about how the medium worked.

I decided to do these fun paintings of the Chrono Trigger characters. I wanted the structure of Toriyama's character design to be undeniable but I wanted to push the realism.

I also did these pieces for The Legend of Korra. Here again i was pushing that realism with mixed results.

So I put some time aside to do another one for this year's season "Book 2 Spirit" and I found myself as a cross roads for how I was going to approach the painting of this piece. If i was going to go for that realistic look or if I was going to take a bit more of a stylized. So I asked my other art buddies and they all thought i should make it a little more stylized with subtle outlines.

I was really psyched about the way this turned out. I felt like I found a look that was something unique to me, and I cant wait to do more! But I have to keep up this comic as well.

So If you feel like you're being too derivative, just throw something different into it to see if it's something you would like to stick with your art.

Now to get back to work on this comic.

Peace!
-TiMBo