Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March, 2025 Read more

Anonymous · 1y

Your art is so cute how do you do it?

Oh! Thank you... I'm glad if you think so, since I try my very best to focus on style. I don't always get it quite right, but I focus on faces especially, which I think are the most impactful and really important to get right. I'll give away a few specific, general tips, based on a few compliments I've received in the past.

  1. My art is frequently called 'soft', or that my lineart is specifically 'soft' and this is likely due to almost every piece having gaussian blurred lineart. Not only is it really aesthetically pleasing, it's SUPER simple and practically no effort. I use Clip Studio and this is as simple as duplicating your lineart layer and going to filter > gaussian blur and playing with the settings until you are satisfied with the result. If you know how to work Auto Actions, there are also many other interesting and sometimes more intricate ways to do a similar thing. I usually just manually do the above and do nothing special. (If you have Clip Studio please take advantage of the user submitted tools that are accessible because there is so much amazing and frequently free brushes, gradients, etc)

  2. Look at your favorite artists' work. Look at it a lot!! Train your eyes to note what makes the style their style... Like specific highlight techniques, facial proportions, shapes, etc. Texture. Line thickness. I like to mimic styles and borrow techniques and it results in a generally fluid style that isn't stuck rigidly... Actually, I think I really struggle keeping to one style, which is a problem for some artists. I really enjoy looking at production materials and character reference sheets for anime that I really like the style of. Use references a lot when drawing. Maybe this is obvious, but my art is the result of many, many hours of studying my favorite artists' art by eye, and sometimes mimicking certain techniques. I think I'm very influenced by 2000s anime and games especially... And I've found that if your proportions or poses are not so good (It's rough for me), sometimes this matters a lot less if your STYLE is really attractive.

The faces... Make sure the faces are alright. I think it's what most viewers immediately notice first. They spot the imperfections there immediately, or any uncanniness, unless there's a big imperfection elsewhere. Within reason, you don't have to be a god at hands or bodies, if you have a great solid style and use of colors. I really realized this when I came upon certain artists whose bodies, poses, understanding of that sort of thing seemed to be very rudimentary, but the way they drew character emotion, faces, and texture was SO incredible, that I was captivated. They were able to draw something so impactful with what a lot of people would consider 'limited' or 'beginner' art, except you could tell that these artists were obviously NOT beginners. There is so much skill in picking colors, composition, and depicting emotion.

It's kind of a ramble, but those are my thoughts... Maybe they're helpful in some way!

Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting

*italic text* for italic text

**bold text** for bold text

[link](https://example.com) for link