How are you so good at art/digital drawing? I love your style, I like to sketch but I feel like I find it really hard to develop a distinctive style of my own especially with characters because it's so wildly inconsistent
To be honest, I started taking my art seriously back in 2018 and it was an absolute nightmare for me until late 2022 when I really think I got my footing. It seriously just takes time to develop these things--unfortunately. I very vividly recall this sketchbook page I did back then that was me being absolutely depressed over the fact that I didn't have a "style". But I think style is very fluid and subjective. It's something that changes and develops over time and you just have to be patient. I STILL find my art to be very inconsistent a lot of the time. And I really couldn't tell you what my "style" is supposed to encompass, it's just the most comfortable and easily memorable way I draw things, not something I do intentionally.
One of the best things that worked for me when developing my art style was this: Get obsessed. Obviously my account here is dedicated to Alex Rider, but that was certainly not the first thing I was obsessed with drawing--Though it was one of the most intense drawing periods I've ever had. I have an entire 100 page sketchbook that is mostly just Alex drawings and i am NOT kidding. But anyway, it definitely helped that this fandom is smaller, so I wasn't inundated with art that made me think everything had been done already. Did you know I never drew backgrounds in my digital art until I started drawing for Alex Rider? You can literally see the chronology of me learning to do backgrounds. I'll tell you that I did not have a fucking clue what I was doing but I did it anyway because I had to get the ideas out. You can't let yourself be scared to explore anything, because you're just holding yourself back.
Another thing: Get competitive. It sounds kinda stupid, but my art took off when I started watching this one artist on youtube do their sketchbook tours and I wanted to mimic the frequency at which they drew and how creative they were. It got to the point where I would rewatch their videos so often and I decided i needed to be BETTER than them. We had a one sided rivalry that I had to win. Now, did I develop a horrible superiority complex over it? Most certainly. But I can say that it did wonders for my art. I would pick apart their drawings and see what I think I could do better and then I would make myself do better.
In the end though, you're your own worst critic. I think a lot of the art I post is bad. But you shouldn't let that stop you at all.
Now I would totally post some of my old art pieces for comparison to my improvement but its so painful because they're awful. I could also explain my actual digital art process, but idk how much help that would be because I've been told my a lot of people that I draw like a psychopath--Tho to be fair, one artist I really respect told me that its a very typical way to draw so like, up to you.
