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July Q&A
🕑 Added 2021-07-24 02:19:50 +0000 UTCWow, it looks like we've managed to get through a lot of big and burning questions in the past few months!
Last month we've only had one additional question, so I figured it would be simpler to break convention to answer this in a written format:
Cristina asks:
Hi, I know I’m late here but I just have a question. So I know the best way to get noticed and hired as a new artist is to drawing fanart, but whenever I draw fanart I just don’t feel it. Should I hold my ground and focusing on original content or should I push myself to draw more fanart? Thank you.
Answer:
Cristina asked a pretty good question that I myself used to wonder about - should newer artists invest time in creating fanart, especially if they're not feeling it?
It's actually a pretty tough question - there are definite tangible benefits to spending time to create and post fanart of popular franchises:
1. It's immediately relatable to a large number of people, their investment into the franchise/IP helps a lot in getting them interested in your piece by relation.
2. You save some energy on designing from scratch (that's also true for recurring original characters/IPs) and can spend it on other areas of the drawing process.
3. Fanart is also "easier" to share on platforms with a share function (Twitter, FB). It's relevant and more of a norm to share something that most if not all of your friends already know of.
It's definitely can be very helpful to newer artists trying to get more eyes on their work! Unfortunately, there is a little catch - sometimes you may not enjoy doing it as much as your own original work, something that Cristina is experiencing.
My recommendation would be to maximize your own enjoyment, not just because it's "easier", but because motivation can often be a silent bottleneck to developing your art into a career. I always nag about how doing art is a very long term, marathon-like process, and it's just as applicable here. Regardless of what path you choose, it's going to take some time to get to going, if constantly drawing something you don't like is weighing you down significantly, or even replacing what you like to draw, then it might be time to consider trying out new strategies. - For example, do fanart of stuff you actually enjoy (double win!) and draw what you enjoy the most, even if the numbers tell you otherwise.
Fortunately, from what I've observed, original art can also be very "shareable" and numbers-friendly - many cool concepts, great ideas and well presented compositions can really get people into them instantly, it's just slightly less "forgiving" as you can't always rely on the subject material to attract as much attention as fanart of a popular IP.
And if you manage to develop your original art to a high level, you may even start spawning fanart of your own characters!
So in conclusion, my recommendation is to just enjoy the process at much as possible - striking a balance where necessary. If you like doing a lot of fanart, great! If you like doing a little bit here and there, or not at all, it's completely up to you, don't feel pressured to anything you really don't want to - again, it's very important to manage your own morale.
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Thanks for reading and feel free to submit your own questions for next month in the comments below!
Comments
another question: can painting using shapes be the main learning method if one is solely interested in digital painting or should drawing with lines be prioritized? In my shallow experience with drawing so far, I think that observation + testing out the observation in drawing and refining the understanding is the learning process. Are drawing using lines and painting with shapes interchangeable in this learning process?
Hi, do you have tips on how to properly perform photo studies for beginners? Were photo studies a big part of your own progress? What are the most important things to learn when doing these studies? Did you learn purely with digital illustration? Given digital illustration software's ability of undos, adjustments, do you have suggestions on doing photo studies with digital illustration? (I think other than working really really hard consistently, you must have been focusing on improving the right things deliberately)
GUWEIZ
Thank you for the question! It's a really good one, so I'll have to think quite a bit about it myself. Although at the moment I still very much see this potential project as a very personal one, but we'll see how things go.
Mickaël Gil
All your recent publications seem to have become more consistent and have reinforced both your artistic imprint and your universe. Each illustration seems to tell us a story, where we can guess the role and personality of your heroines and the universe that surrounds them. Are you trying to tell us a story in filigree - that you could flesh out later ? Do you feel like an illustrator who would also be a scriptwriter or would you prefer to delegate to someone else a possible script in order to concentrate only on the drawing ?
