Personal Work Y2T3

I don't really like talking about my personal work for a number of reasons, most of them related to it being personal and a lot of it is just. Mindless doodling and stuff I draw on a Saturday night because I feel like it, ahah.

I went through something of a style change this term though, I'm not sure whether permanent or not. Mostly I just wanted to try something new and I was getting fed up with my work being so static. I also watched a bunch of cartoons that I really enjoyed the art styles of, as previously mentioned, particularly Danny Phantom, Dude That's My Ghost and The Loud House, and I wanted to take somethig stylistically from those that would both improve my personal work and help me stylise buildings.

I also started using Photoshop CC (instead of Elements 11) which meant I had suddenly waaaaay more functionality on my tablet and way more brushes to play around with, which meant I fiddled round with them a bit for a while before being influenced particulalry by the ink brushes and the effects I could get with it.

Here's a bunch of drawings I did early in the term, not including the ones I already posted as part of Cell Urself:

These didn't make enough of a change on my style even though they all use different brushes?? I did however at this point start lining things digitally, which is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, as pen takes ages to clean up and doesn't allow for certain styles and a degree of fluidity you can get with lining digitally. That said, that much pen control on a tablet is kinda of from muscle memory so it's reeeeally hard to get into doing it, but I've been doing it non-stop all terms so hopefully I'm improving.

I drew these for badges at some point but they're kinda rushed (hence flat colours) but they sell fine so I have no intentions of redoing them. However, I was getting really sick of my style at this point?? I feel like everything looks the same?

These for example are suuuuuper stiff and they just. Lack something.

It was at this point I got bored of the soft brushes and started fiddling round with the ink brushes. I've always wanted a soft, blendy style but my brain works best with cell shading and bold lines, I imagine because of the amount of manga I grew up reading and how that's shaded (particularly the work of Ken Akamatsu). I enjoyed the feel of the bottom left, which is a sumi-e brush (and screentone) and therefore fiddled around with that for a long while:

But yeah it really doesn't work with the art style and I came to realise my anatomy is also crap. Or rather, my anatomy skills are heavily flawed but I know for a fact there are easier ways to shorthand anatomy such that it's less obvious, for example, simplifying the style. Also, it's going to take me forever to fix my awful anatomy so I wanted something more immediate that would pull me out of what was now becoming a little bit of a funk.

Most of this comes through in sketchbook work and pencil drawings which unfortunately I haven't scanned so "finished" drawing and doodles only to illustrate this, but again, I looked a lot at Kaz Aizawa's work and although I studied 0 faces and people (since he worked backgrounds) it was still easy enough to apply the way he formed shapes and lines to my current style and essentially make my current style more simple and angular.

The style is far from perfect and I think it's still obvious my anatomy sucks but I feel like I understand more about?? form and direction and stuff. Plus I feel like the works themselves are clearly stronger as pieces? 

Either way I'm happier with what I've been doing and I want to include more backgrounds in these like the ones I did for "BLOCK", now I have the time.