First, here’s some fan art of Aemond from the House of the Dragon…
Ok, so, topic for today… how to find your drawing style.
I didn’t follow this advice.
When I first started drawing comics… I mean, actually drawing a comic and not just copying Rob Liefeld panels, I struggled to find a style that I could be consistent with. I had the shiny object syndrome of looking at art from a lot of different artists and wanting to draw like them.
The problem was, they actually spent years “developing their style”. I was just taking a stab at a random cool way of drawing an arm or hand.
I went through a lot of different phases… Mike Mignola, Scott McDaniel, Travis Charest, back to Mike Mignola and around and around to so many artists that I became infatuated with (usually settling back on Mignola).
My problem, that I was too dense to realize at the time, was something a lot of artists go through when they’re inexperienced and lacking confidence. I was trying to draw like these other artists and not taking influence from them. I was impatient and thought I could just power through and figure it out as I went along.
That’s not how art works.
Sure, I guess there are some prodigies that can pick up a pencil and are amazing from the get go.
For the rest of us, though, drawing is hard.
So what’s the advice that I didn’t follow? How do you actually develop a style?
It’s actually pretty simple… but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The best way is to draw in a sketchbook that you don’t care about. All the time.
Now, when I say “all the time” I don’t actually mean carrying around a sketchbook and drawing whenever you have a spare second. That’s an unrealistic goal that will only make you feel bad about yourself. What I actually mean is, whenever the inspiration to draw something hits you, grab your sketchbook and draw.
Full disclosure… I’ve actually been terrible at keeping a regular habit of drawing in a sketchbook. For a long time, my opinion was “I have all these comic plans and ideas, on top of doing a regular comic strip… I don’t have time for a sketchbook”.
I mean, I was drawing a lot and that’s great. The problem is, I was doing the work of experimenting with styles in my actual comic strip instead of in a sketchbook. The result was a sometimes wildly inconsistent design for my characters. If you look at the very first Change Log comic and the last one I drew last week, they don’t look like they were drawn by the same person.
So my advice, if you want to develop your style… make bad drawings. Play around in a sketchbook and don’t worry about how bad the drawings might be. Allow yourself to experiment and try things. Copy drawings from other artists to study how they do things. Find a few artists whose styles you like and try to recreate how they draw shapes. Don’t focus on rendering, focus on structure, silhouettes, and proportions.
Most of all, play and have fun without worrying about anyone ever seeing what you’re doing. If you want to share your sketchbook drawings with people, that’s fine, but it’s pretty liberating to make art that you have no intention of ever showing anyone.
If something clicks with you, incorporate it into your “style”.
My other advice… style doesn’t matter. If you think about it, “style” is just how you draw something. It can vary from one drawing to the next. When you start to let it go and not worry about it, that’s really how your personal style develops.
So in the interest of working out bad drawings in your sketchbook, here are some of my recent sketchbook pages. None of them are particularly good, but that’s not the point of a sketchbook.
Thanks for reading! If you want to see more of my artwork/sketches/ramblings, follow me on X and here on Substack Notes. And if you really want to support me, I have a store!
Also, if you’re into political cartoons, I have another newsletter called Political Nomad with a new comic every Thursday.
Have a great week!
-Brad