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"Read this. It's from Comic Arts Agent, David Campiti. His assertion is one of the reasons I push my students so hard:
A RANT ABOUT DIGITAL ART: For God's sake, folks -- why does your DIGITAL ART all look like everyone else's? In the nearly 200 line art samples I've received in the past 10 days, MOST are so damn similar you could swear three or four people submitted them all. They take on a very generic look, the storytelling has the energy level of a daytime soap, and the inking is often a dead-weight line.
Don't tell me it's the limitation of the medium. Artists like Mike Deodato and Will Conrad and Mel Joy San Juan do amazing work drawing on a Cintiq. The idea of "going digital" was supposed to make the process easier, importing backgrounds and creating graphic libraries for go-to elements and so much more -- including no need to scan your line art. But if your methods are so unlearned, so amateurish that such drawn-on-paper comics artist as Joe Bennett can draw rings around you, without a tablet or computer in sight, then drawing digitally is not a tool for you -- it's a crutch.
I swear, some digital artists have flung much of comicdom back decades in the quality of art being submitted. They've never even bothered to learn the dramatic, powerful storytelling and character performance that Eisner, Kirby, Adams, Kane, and so many others brought to the biz. They don't even grasp how amazing inking can be, because they haven't studied Raymond and Fine and Raboy and Frazetta and Schultz and Cho and Stevens and so many others.
Truthfully, ladies and gents: If a hundred other people are drawing dull digital pages just like you, what will make you stand out for editors to notice and hire you? Editors want the BEST available people for the job, and "barely adequate and uninspired" is not good enough."
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You are in an echo chamber of imitation. This habit, and the proliferation of fan art in artist alley at every convention, has opened the floodgates of sameness. Where is all the original content?
If you want your art to stand out, be unique. If you need to get inspired -- LOOK BACK! Don't look at all the same stuff that's being shared among your peers. Social media is a hall of mirrors. Shatter this.
Look at past icons. Look past them to what they were looking at. Where do you find this sort of reference??? Museums. Exhibition catalogs. Out of print art technique books and artist biographies. It is work? Yes. It is worth it? Artistic growth doesn't come cheap, but it is priceless...
Los Angeles will soon have this premiere art reference resource: https://lucasmuseum.org/collection. Read the article to see names of some of the artists featured in this collection. If you aren't familiar with them, start searching.
The internet brings easy access to images that used to require trips to research libraries. Follow links to verified sources, like university collection, museums and libraries. Make the most of the best of the internet. Look back!
Dumbo concept art by Bill Peet (1915-2002)
Wallace Tripp (1940-2018)
Andreas Deja is a modern-day animation legend with a passion for looking back at great artists.
http://andreasdeja.blogspot.com/
More Deja art history lessons from previous posts here:
https://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2015/11/andreas-deja-nine-old-men-book-and.html
https://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2014/05/line-horses-and-wire-frogs.html
Storyboard artist Benton Jew shares names of several icons in recent interviews (these excerpt from July posts on blog, here's link to one of them)
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2019/07/so-many-artist-friends-at-sdcc-shop.html
Benton Jew (Artist Alley DD-23)
Indie artist Benton Jew added this pic and post"Bumped into my old ILM compadre, master model maker, fx supervisor and director, Bill George. Any vehicle in a Star Trek movie he’s probably had a hand in as well as many other classic sci-fi favorites!"
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mike-manley/pencil-to-pencil/e/
I listened to the podcast while doing a mandatory workout. Podcasts add an educational element to necessary exercise. In my case, it's due to a chronic medical condition. For artists, you have to be mindful of long hours of drawing (and sitting) taking a toll on your health. Be proactive now, so you can be productive for years!. The audio is a little rough for the first half. Guest Tim Burgard has to leave about half-way through the episode, so starting around the 40 min mark the rest of the episode is all Benton Jew. At the 56 min mark he starts addressing the need for up-and-coming artists to be "intellectually curious" about the art field they want to pursue. This means knowing the names and contributions of artists in that field. Studying older films. He drops some powerful truths about the need to be literate in film language if you hope to be speaking with directors and other top tier behind-the-lens talent. Listen to him on this episode. Study the films he references. They are essentials!
In this video interview on You Tube! Benton mentions learning to draw by studying past artist icons like Andrew Loomis and Stan Drake. Don't know their work? Learn from visiting the SNB website or store. https://stuartngbooks.com/loomis-successful-drawing-en-2.html
https://stuartngbooks.com/kelly-green-the-complete-collection.html
Why so much focus on equine art? Creature designer and scientific illustrator Terryl Whitlatch gives art demos around the world. She is known for her command of animal anatomy. According to Whitlatch, horses are the most challenging of all animals to draw because their physiology is the most extreme.
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2015/12/gift-of-inspiration-equine-artists-jo.html
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2015/09/terryl-whitlatch-horse-art-and-creature.html
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2014/09/get-inspired-norman-thelwell-special_5.html
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-inspiration-george-ford-morris.html
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/gift-of-inspiration-cw-anderson.html
http://stuartngbooks.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-horse-reference-scale-models-up-to.html
Horse Information Chart by Sam Savitt. This and other reference charts by Savitt available on the website run by his family: http://www.samsavitt.com/charts.html
Animator James Baxter, renowned for his horse art in the 2002 animated feature Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron, discuses how important it is to learn to draw animals in this interview from the Bancroft Bros podcast. https://taughtbyapro.com/podcasts/animation-podcast-105-the-james-baxter-interview/
Plus learn about this pencil test he did when he was 20 years old!
This post from website My Modern Met discusses the Japanese Woodblock Prints that influenced Vincent Van Gogh, and shares a link where woodblocks from Van Gogh's personal collection can be downloaded for free!
From the February 3, 2019 My Modern Met post by Jessica Stewart.
https://mymodernmet.com/van-gogh-museum-japanese-woodblock-prints/
"The Dutch painter acquired his first box of prints in Antwerp and tacked them to the walls of his studio. By taking in these exotic influences, Van Gogh hoped to modernize his own art and wrote his brother Theo about the impact of his new discovery. “Japanese art is something like the primitives, like the Greeks, like our old Dutchmen, Rembrandt, Potter, Hals, Vermeer, Ostade, Ruisdael. It doesn’t end.”
Like many artists, Van Gogh was fascinated by the compositions of the prints, which didn’t adhere to the standard rules of Western Art. Japanese artists were not afraid to crop out elements, exclude the horizon, use unusual color combinations, and leave space in the middle foreground of their work. Van Gogh began to adopt some of these principles as he learned that the Japanese aesthetics freed him from the rigid compositional rules typically employed by European artists."
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