#fanaticfandomfaun

 ive been drawing my whole life! (always an odd question for me bc like…. yall stopped drawing after kindergarten? what did you do all day??)

as for developing style, my biggest piece of advice is just! keep! drawing! its been a bit hard to follow my own advice lately because my depression keeps fucking up my motivation and for the first time in my life i just dont feel like drawing, at all, ever. but if youre having similar motivational issues or if youre just starting out and you just arent feeling satisfied with your art, dont give up! the less you draw the harder it will be! i have a personal policy (that i dont actually remember to follow) where even if i dont want to, even if i hate how it looks, i have to draw at least once a day every single day. i swear it will improve your work if you do this. its hard, i know, i havent been doing it, but follow my advice not my example! (honestly im the embodiment of that quote “I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.” by Lewis Carol)

the other piece of advise i have is honestly…… steal art. 

“gasp! but Kate,” you say, “stealing art is bad and wrong!!” you say, “i know because of all those ‘art theft is bad and wrong’ posts i reblog!”

look. thats not what im saying, im not telling any of you to try to pass anyone elses art as your own, or use other peoples art without their credit. dont to that its bad and wrong. what im saying is LOOK at other peoples art and copy what they do. copying other peoples art styles is how every artist has learned for centuries. i started out drawing myself as a powerpuff girl or as a pokemon character just like everyone else. hell, i used to straight up print out and trace drawings i found on deviant art, which is a perfectly viable way to learn styles (muscle memory) so long as you dont try to pass it off as your own work then honestly its not stealing.

for example recently i was trying to draw these cat characters i had come up with, and i could not for the life of me draw these cats they were just turning out so ugly,

so i was like “well fuck this, i just need to find a simpler style” and by some kind of MIRACLE, while i was looking up drawings of cats i stumbled across this one blog, daily cat drawings. and it was like, holy shit this is it this is the exact style i need to draw my cats in. so first thing i did was try to follow some of their drawings exactly, not tracing but the closest you can get by sight. 

this is one of dailycatdrawing’s drawings:

and this was my attempt to copy it:

after i felt like i kinda had it down i drew that athena. NOT based off of any one of dailycatdrawing’s pieces, but still using the basics of their style. after that i felt confident enough using this style to draw the rest of my cats and they turned out great! naturally i had to draw hermes again because i couldnt just use such a blatant copy of another artists work, and it turned out even better than before!

which proves my earlier advice about how every single time you draw youre improving! its also important to note that even if you try to copy an artists style exactly you will probably never have it perfectly, and thats a GOOD THING! because it means that you arent truly stealing someone elses work, youre just using it as an example of ONE WAY a drawing can be good. by paying attention to MANY artists styles you can use all of them together to make your own unique style! even trying to copy dailycatdrawing’s style to a T i still ended up using elements from other artists and my own experience to change the style just enough to make it personal. looking at hermes’ face you can tell ive unintentionally taken some inspiration from lackadaisy’s art style, another artist i really admire. 

Oh man, this is a bit tricky to answer because I firmly believe that everyone finds a unique middle ground depending on their writing style! It really depends where you start naturally and, unfortunately, I’ve never been a great poet! For me it’s always been adding description and adding touches of some purple prose rather than toning it down! My natural style is very stripped and bare. Example:

“You’ve betrayed me,” she says. She looks at the ground, noticing that her shoelaces are, for once, tied. “Again.”

“I did,” he says. He owes her the truth now, at the end.

It takes me a bit of thinking to get to:

“You’ve betrayed me,” she says, throat aching. There’s something crumbling in the air, something that is making the world look strange and frightening. She looks at her shoes to try and ground herself and thinks it’s ironic that today of all days is the day she managed to tie them.

“I did.” A statement. A fact. Nothing in it but the truth because, at the end of it all, he owes that to her.

So being a little poetic is never bad! Lapsing into poetic language can really add to a scene and I personally like that style!

My advice is to make sure you have some really simple bits to sort of emphasize the poetic ones. It’s okay to write ‘Cars drove by in the background’ when describing a highly poetic, emotional scene. The simplicity juxtaposed with the poetry is really cool in my opinion.

With writing, it’s better to focus on the scene and then add a sentence or two of feeling. The action is the most important because it speaks for itself. I try to keep my scenes within a certain narrative space. Like, five hundred words for a long fight scene. If I can fit some flowery language in there, I’ll try to just to make it flow better. But if I can’t, it’s more important to keep the story moving.

So...I suppose I’d say that a little can go a long way. Strip your sentences where you can and let them fly poetically across the page in places where it counts.