Art Style Influences:
Craig McCracken
Genndy Tartakovsky
JC Leyendecker
Andrew Wyeth
Ashcan School
If you combine all these artists, you get my high and low art styles. These influences all work together and you can see Wyeth principles leak their way into my McCracken style ‘toons, but they do definitively split at times making my “low” style (cartoons) and my “high” style (more realistic paintings).
My cartoon style focuses on color and tonal shaping with little or no outlines whenever possible.
My more realistic style still focuses on shaping, but as you can see, there’s a lot more texture and detail.
I infinitely prefer my cartoon style because it’s so different from the norm, but 99% of the time people pick me up for my alternate style. I don’t hate it, but it’s something that can get lost in the ocean. Know what I mean?
If you’re just starting out trying to find a style for yourself, what worked for me was finding my favorite artists and looking for similarities. Figure out what you can imitate or what you prefer one artist does over another. For example, you’ll find a great deal goes into shaping with ALL of the artists/schools I’ve mentioned. I prefer to not use outlines like Tartakovsky, but someone like McCracken is all about heavy black strokes. There is far more to compare, but you get the idea.
I rarely look at any of my influences these days; I’ve adapted all I can from them and it’s up to me to hone what I’ve created for myself. You can get bogged down as much by influence as research. There would inevitably be a bit of idolization toward your artists of choice and that can lead to comparing yourself to them too much; I had to check myself on this before. Learn the rules, all of them, then you can break them within your own limitations.
Years of experience have helped me learn I’m actually not much of a finish illustrator. My portfolio doesn’t have full blown compositions teeming with environments, characters, and polish. As you can see by my “visual math” pictures, I have isolated characters or pieces/hints of larger things. My strengths are with individual assets, layout and composition, texture, and imitation (of other artists’ styles). The strongest pieces are far more unfinished and energetic. Taking a piece to polish kills my best work by stiffening it and losing emotion. Just like in MMOs, I work best as a support class. I help make up the pieces that round out the whole in the conceptual and production art stages. Research and ideas come easily to me and I happily get caught up in learning about new cultures and referring to ancient art.
It dawned on me two years ago that instead of trying so hard to be something that I’m not, I should focus on what I do well. I’m no Dutch Master, but I bet you’d have a lot more fun looking at one of my sketches anyway.
“Style” comes from our imperfections. Giving characters big eyes and tiny bodies is incorrect in relation to the rules of anatomy, but it makes them interesting to view, doesn’t it?