Tough Trees, Stylistic Studies, De-referencing: Art Block 3

Welcome to the next part of art block, my Q&A series about art and motivation. My name’s Mt Kanjon, and I’m excited to talk about styles and study strategies today. If you’ve stumbled upon this and you are curious about learning to draw, take a look at the rest of my channel! Let’s jump right in again:

Flexiblue

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Flexiblue writes in:

I feel like I’ve stopped learning, though I keep trying to. Personally, I’m struggling with trees because I can’t find the tools to draw them (in the program in using, which is Android Sketchbook, the only one I can use).

Couple points in this. For one, it’s natural to feel like you’ve plateaued in your learning here and there. That happens to me too, that happens to all artists. You find places where things suddenly click, and you’ve applied it to your art, and accelerated. But other times you’ll feel like your drawing is stagnant. All of that is just your skills of seeing versus making art getting ahead of each other over time. Especially when you try to make, point two:

Trees! Trees are tricky, and you need to have the right level of detail to make something believable. If they’re in the background, you usually want less detail, and you can use that to your advantage to make them a bit blobbier. Get out some softer brushes, or even some with an interesting texture, and mash down the vague silhouette of a tree. Then, looking at a reference photo, see where the light hits the tree, and using another lighter color and a smaller brush, try putting down some light marks. Don’t be exact, and don’t worry about trying this a ton of times: that’s why you have undo, and each time you try and miss, you’ve learned a little bit. Then do the same thing with shadows! Scatter marks through the trees.

This is often where people seek out tree and foliage brush packs. Sketchbook does let you import brush packs, but it doesn’t seem to support the most common formats for this, so that may be a bit tedious. Those brush packs need to be used carefully on their own, though, since you can very easily have noticeable repeated patterns that you don’t want, so don’t feel like you’re missing out on too much.

The other approach is to build that tree out piece by piece, gradually increasing your level of detail to where you want it to be. Using a reference, start by making your best effort with just the tree trunk. Then some very rough branches: pay attention to how they bend up and down and out. Then some smaller branches on those. Then: leaves, needles, and all that. See what the general shapes are of those, and how you can vary them. Then, once more, play around with light and shadow: that’s how you really make trees look alive.

Honestly, a fantastic way to learn to paint trees? Bob Ross. Pull that stuff up on YouTube and follow along with some. Sketchbook has a brush called Synthetic Oil built-in that’s really good at this. Give it a shot!

KraBat_SouZa

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KraBat_SouZa writes:

I’m always starting on trying new things but somehow I turn it back to the style that I usually do. Every 1 in 100 turns into what I was trying to do, but the next one is back to the stereotype. For example, this art of Mae, but the next “big project” got back onto stereotype.

Well, first of all both of these are fantastic and I hope that you can see progress throughout your art. But I know that you want to expand your style. So the night in the woods artwork that you made has that sort of style from the game, and you’ve taken it and made it your own. And that’s kind of the way that you go about this: keep finding artwork that you like and study that style and see how you can use that in your drawings. You can do this through fanart, or intentionally using different kinds of brushes or different ways of painting.

Looking at the other artwork that you made, and some of the others on your Instagram, I can see which ones are the style that you’re referring to. But I can also see that that style has evolved throughout the year. It can be hard to see that sometimes with your own art until it has been a while, but it is there. And it’s almost definitely because you have been looking at other art, noticing the parts you like, and incorporating that into your style as you study.

But the key thing here is to keep doing those studies of art that you’re unfamiliar with. Each time you will automatically learn just a little bit about how that works. Over time without even trying, you will continue to build this into your own style when you are drawing freely from your imagination. Your style is just a representation of how you have learned to create art. Studies are how you continue that learning, and each one will leave a mark on your style. Really cool progress! Keep it up.

Obstriker

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Obstriker says:

Hey Kanjon! I rely on references too much! I seemingly always have to “compare” my sketches/art to something in order to decide “yes, this is good enough/accurate/it looks like the thing it looks like”. I feel like it’s stunting my growth and ability to just draw my own way (and be happy with the results). Do you have any tips to get comfy without references? PS: Love the channel, keep it up!!

Aww, thank you! So referencing: using references and relying on them is a decent place to be as far as diligently learning. But I understand the desire to want to create without references or at least using them less. You’re sitting right about here on the spectrum of drawing, and you’re aiming to be a little bit more over here towards the imagination.

So here’s what we can do. This isn’t something that you would use to learn necessarily so you don’t often hear me mention this, but if you want to break out of referencing, we’re going to lean heavily into imagination. Get a blank sketchbook page and start drawing something. It can be art that you’ve done before. It can be something you’ve been thinking of, whatever. But you’re going to do this completely without references. Draw it once loosely, try to spend only a couple minutes. Then maybe try it again, but use your imagination to exaggerate things even farther.

Think of older, Disney cartoons, where the animation is so exaggerated that it shouldn’t be possible. If your character is getting ready to jump, for example, don’t just have them bent down a little bit, but have them lean back an absurd amount, bending their knees crazily, as if they’re going to launch up to the moon with their leap. And then try it again and exaggerate even more! Our brains naturally want to draw what feels safe and natural, and we tend to overcorrect for that. Good use of references will probably mean that you haven’t overcorrected too much, but let’s push the boundaries anyway.

Try this out with a few different kinds of subjects over time. You can thumbnail them repeatedly, or set yourself time limits, something that just gets you drawing them over and over. You’re not going to change your patterns in one sitting, but letting yourself go to the extremes and have some loose fun with it can help encourage you to keep doing that.

And then when you get back to creating art with your usual mode, you might find that you’ll use some reference as a good bit, but you’ll start mixing in some of your own flair and exaggeration. Try it out! Tag me with what you draw, I’d love to see what you make.

And that’s it for this round again! I have one more batch of questions up soon. I hope everyone can get something useful out of these. Studies or imagination, go have a lovely time drawing today.