#toning

Pencil art of a Starking apple.

This drawing made me realise what your personal style actually means, and why is it so hard to achieve it.

Artist Journal trip comes:

Now, I have been struggling with art for a while, besides the burnout and the everyday busyness I had the feeling that there is a level of skill that I cannot surpass. I tried many things, went to art classes, drawn a lot routinely, asked for criticisms, but nothing.

After all this, I asked, what is drawing and what is a personal style.

Drawing is 2D depiction of 3D objects, or concepts. And with the traditional painting knowledge (first video good example) that too much detail, and a lot of useless lines don't make a painting good. Therefore, I tried to think of a way to apply this in drawing. After all, to draw it is not easy to avoid lines, curves.

Then I thought about 3D, and topology, when we simplify the surface of objects with polygons. Think about any 3d software like Blender.

Italian Renaissance painters had so much time, they did that on paper: (Wiki link of Mathematics and art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art 2025.06.22.)

And so I imagined the object of my drawing, an apple as a 3d object, but opposed to the renaissance artist I used loose lines, like panning to trace the faces of the 3d apple in my mind. Using reference as it is a study.

This is the simple imperfect sketch, trying to understand and study the 3d surface in 2d.

Then comes the toning, same as before I tried to follow the direction of the surface with my hatching. But for the intensity I applied the knowledge of the way the eye and the reflection of light works. (fourth video for more in depth)

As for the main topic of my essay, personal style.

Personal style is not more than your personal though process, and artistic decision making while doing art.

For me it seems thinking in 3d, topology and shapes is a big game changer. And this meant for me to surpass my past limitation. Because, yes, yess I can imitate, a style or that which has been taught to me, but It is better to use those as building bricks to build your own way of thinking.

Thanks for reading to the end, have fun drawing!

Useful youtube videos: