LICH LOVED

that's a great question!

i feel like growing up on the internet - especially in the dark deviantart days - i was exposed to a lot of different art styles and had a lot of favourite artists whose work i admired or really wanted to emulate. so, i think my 'style' developed out of copying bits of other artists whose work i admired. i really loved (and still do) the desaturated, work of hamletmachine and the way that they use hard blacks and flat colours. that was hugely influential, when i first encountered it. other artists i like and who i think are a big influence are @skincube, @ston-henge, and @choodraws.

i think that some of what is characteristic of my 'style' also developed out of necessity. for example, i basically learned how to draw armor from getting really obsessed with world of warcraft, and i think people would say that fancy, baroque armor is pretty typical of my art now. other media has been influential too - d&d, berserk, warhammer 40k, etc.

in terms of feedback, i went to art school. i was fortunate in that nobody ever told me to 'stop' drawing a certain way, but i did get told to try different things, and I always did so, at least once. i don't really worry too much about 'staying true' to what I enjoy. i've been experimenting with a lot more black lately in my illustrations, rather than the clean lines that i think people associate with me, and doing more (bad) digital painting. I might get tired of that and do something else -- i'm not worried about getting 'stuck' in a style i don't like.

just to give you some idea about how much my style has changed, here's the same illustration, first from 2012 and then from 2018.

and then something more recent.

i could make you worse