I have very nearly zero formal education in the arts, so whilst I ramble about theory today, you must forgive me if I use some terms incorrectly. Nevertheless, I think you will get the gist of what I’m saying. And for hardcore arts people, I’m sure you will have heard this all before. Bear with me, every so often I must talk these things through.

 
So, you may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been having a stylistic identity crisis. Maybe crisis is the wrong word. I’d like it to be resolved, but there’s no imminent danger.

If you’ve been following my blog for any length of time, you’ll notice that I draw in a lot of different styles. Just the last few entries should make that apparent. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with drawing in different styles, but I have been struggling with a more unified overall approach, and I think I need to figure out which style I’m going to focus on and attempt to master.

I’ve been attempting to move towards streamlined shapes with a lot of energy, which goes against literally decades of focusing on details and structure. When I was younger, I fixated more so on drawing things “right.” But you can draw something completely “right” with every detail in place, and it will still lack that undefinable thing that makes a piece of art interesting. And something that’s sort-of related to that–I’ve really become opposed to fussiness in drawing. I still like complexity. And I certainly don’t want to dumb things down. But fussy character design or composition is never a good thing.

I tend to get bogged down with details, so today’s piece was a bit of a style test. I wanted to draw some Transformers in a more streamlined and dynamic manner, without being such a slave to detail and geometry.

In regards to what I’m trying to achieve, I don’t think it worked. As a stand alone thing, the piece is decent enough, but Optimus still looks pretty stiff, and in the end, I still got a little hung up on details. However, on the plus side, the drawing itself didn’t take long at all. (Coloring it still took me forever because I’m slooow.)

Well, what can you do? Back to the drawing board, but first, sleep.