http://www.jetpens.com/Uni-ball-Color-Pencil-Lead-0.5-mm-Soft-Blue/pd/1370

Style is something that’s hard to advice about so I’m gonna do my best.

Here’s the thing about style: you have one. It’s unavoidable. Your artistic style is influenced by the way your brain filters the world and turns it into symbols, influenced by the things you love and the things you hate.

If I rounded up all of my coworkers, none of which are skilled artists by any measure, and asked them each to draw a dog*, you would have drastically different dog drawings. And this would be because of personal subconscious stylistic choices in place of skill/technique.

You have a style whether you want one or not, you can’t help it. Your problem isn’t that you don’t have a style — it’s that you haven’t identified it yet.

For example, my “style” was all over the place in high school, I was just mimicking things I enjoyed. I was very good at mimicking styles of shows/comics I liked. However, when I stood back and looked at the entire body of work, I noticed similarities between drawings that were mimicking drastically different sources. I tended to ink thick, I favored curvy/organic lines, I liked big eyes, I liked minimalistic eyes, I tended to detail noses, I like shiny noses, I tended to pad skinny anime characters so they had more muscle/heft/fat, etc.

And it was in community college that I finally realized all the components that made up my style. I noticed all my quirks when I was drawing people from life (big simple eyes, lines to emphasize the curve of cheeks, detailed hair, organic lines, etc), heck even when drawing fruit in a basket one day I realized… i draw objects the way I draw pinup art (thick voluminous lines, curves, avoidance of straight/geometric shapes). So when I stood back, looked at all my illustration work and all my school work and drawings from life, it became apparent to me the elements that made up a unifying style that spanned all of my art.

So with that in mind, I started drawing with the goal of exaggerating those elements and intentionally invoking them. I’m still working on it, but that self-awareness has really helped shaped my art for the better.

So, basically, you have style. You just have to find it. Stop trying to tap into it if you don’t know what it is yet — just draw. Draw as many different kinds of drawings as you can, back away from style and focus on form and technique, focus on improving technically. Your brain knows what it likes, and eventually you’ll be able to identify and distill those elements into a consistent and personal style.

I hope this helped, I woke up 40 minutes ago!

*This is an experiment on this subject that I actually plan to do soon, so stick around for that.

1. I work on 9”x12” smooth Bristol
2. We have a large Epson perfection flatbed scanner that can scan the whole page (and more)— however all pages before 82 were scanned in 2 parts on a tiny cheap HP all-in-one printer/copier/scanner that was a hand-me-down.
3. Depending on the details on the page, the first thing I do to the art is adjust Levels and/or Brightness and Contrast until the lines are as dark, crisp and detailed as I want against the white. The blue will be there still, though it’ll be a lot more saturated and sharp. Then I’ll open up Hue/Saturation and edit Cyan and Blue and turn lightness all the way up and saturation all the way down. Then I desaturate the lineart or convert it to grayscale.

Hope this is helpful :O I was a teachers assistant and a volunteer instructor at different points, but I’m a hands-on kinda teacher so I hope all these words make sense:

• Make committed lines — don’t just follow your pencil lines. You should know what kind of line you want to put down before you put your brush to paper.
• Manipulate your lines. Brushes are lovely and fluid, but you have to learn how to manipulate them to do what you want. Hold them straight vertically to get thin lines, lay the brush on its side to get the fattest lines. You are in complete control of the brush, and you can make it do whatever you want.
• Always have your eyes looking ahead of the line you’re inking to where you want it to go. Guide your hand with your eyes, you don’t need to watch your own hand — that will make you shortsighted and unable to anticipate curves or areas where you need to change the line widths/speed.
• Do not rely on your wrist’s dexterity. Small movements in your fingers and wrists are needed for details and smaller lines, but the longer/thicker and/or more “sweeping” your lines, the more you need to learn to use your entire drawing arm to move to control the line. A painter paints with their whole body — inking with any kind of brush puts you somewhere between a penciller and a painter. Also, leave plenty of room for your drawing arm to move freely and comfortably.
• With that in mind, slanted drawing surfaces become that much more important in allowing your drawing/illustration to be treated like a canvas and allow your hand/arm/chest mobility.

In case you missed it, I submitted a few drawings last night and among those drawings I made some quick guides on how to draw breasts and fat/fat distribution:

• http://littlefroggies.tumblr.com/post/11899609418/the-photoset-wasnt-working-the-way-i-wanted-so
• http://littlefroggies.tumblr.com/post/11898860373/okay-i-figured-id-knock-out-a-really-fast

The only reason I’m posting this is because these are so often requested that I wanna make sure people see them. Just trying to reduce the redundancy of certain questions! Hope this is helpful.

Next time I sit down and draw a comic, I’ll get detailed scans along the way. I got some crappy phone cam pics for an admittedly sloppy page, so until then here’s me copy and pasting that:

Since people have expressed interest and asked questions before, I figured I’d take photos/screenshots of a panel of page 97 as I worked on it. For funsies. Sorry for the phone quality!

First, really quick rough pencils.
Panel’s been quartered off for, I dunno, balance. Made sense at the time. I tend to draw lines connecting characters’ eyes because it really bugs me when eyes don’t meet.

Then, I erase everything til you can barely see the sketches.

Basic shapes.

Rough details.

Camera wouldn’t focus, the marker was too light.
Anyway, then I go over the pencil details I like with a copic marker ( bg10) and erase the rest. Any pencil lines under the copic marker become permanent, it is also what I draw panel borders with. Stole that idea from Kel McDonald.

Then I draw over that the final pencil details.

Then, inks. (they scanned kinda dark, bleh)

(click for big version)
And then, initial editing. More edits were done after this (as you can see on the resective page).

Same stuff with a different panel, except I went straight from rough sketch to marker to details:

There’s more to it than that but if y’all liked this I’ll cover the line editing and tones :U unless that bores ya

That’s really only true of graphic art cameras and old photocopiers. Modern scanners pick up cyan/light blue when scanning in even grayscale because most of them are meant to handle full-color photographs and grayscale images of deeper shades/varying hues. And when black-and-white, it works if the threshold is set to remove it, otherwise it can show up as tiny scratchy black dashes and dots.

Blue lines are still in use because of how easy is is to up the contrast in grays and thresholds for black-and-white to remove them completely. I decide to remove the blue pencils manually because I can keep a close eye on the quality of the black lines and avoid my blue lines being rendered as dots or dashes.

Oh my goodness!

Well, personally I stick with the blue lines because they’re kind to my eyes, but the way the pencils are removed from the finished page is done in a way that you can use any color that isn’t black or gray. I tried green and purple before, and while they still produced clean line work, they hurt my eyes too much.

This is the make of lead I use: http://www.jetpens.com/0.5-mm-Color-Pencil-Leads/ct/368

I use a Platinum OLEeNU mechanical pencil because colored lead tends to break easily, and these pencils are designed to prevent breakage. It isn’t a perfect fix, but it saves me some heartache.

I’m not sure what you meant by hiding a line. Or a “line I didn’t want to ink.” These lines are very light, I darkened them in that picture for visibility, so they are very easy to draw over. And, like I said, I stick with a light blue because it’s easy on the eyes.

I assume maybe by “hiding” you meant making it disapear when scanned. What you’d do is knock the brightness and contrast up a bit to make the blue a little more pure, but not enough to distort the black lines. Open Hue/Saturation,  drop down Cyan (or whichever colors you’re trying to remove) and raise Lightness all the way up, Saturation all the way down. Sometimes you have to do the same with the Blue, if there are still remnants where the pencils were particularly dark. Then, if you aren’t going to reduce the image to Grayscale, Desaturate the line art instead to remove any other hints of color.

I hope that was helpful!

EDIT: I should also note that the guidelines for the layout, bleed and panels is done with Copic markers in a similar color to my pencil.

So someone asked me on Formspring for advice on drawing boobs, and though I typed the response hastily, at least 2 people thought it was worth me posting elsewhere. So I’m copy-n-pasting it here. In case anyone wants to read it.

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