Hey it's Hyperjam here, it's been almost a year since my last post and like the last post never really had anything to say until now-especially in my own art and how i see it, but i'll elaborate on that later so let's jump into it.

Appeal in art

Appeal is something i think is necessary when your making art, but recently i feel like there's many artists who try to make everything they make "cute". This isn't to say you can't draw cutesy but i feel like as an artist you need to have flexiblility and have the ability to draw ugly, all the nitty gritty details that all the other artists ignore. Whenever an artist tries to draw a gross or gritty looking city it never looks real, it always looks like what someone who's never been in the city thinks is gritty. But on the opposite ends of the spectrum you have films with grit like Heavy Traffic, Akira, or MFKZ. You can tell in these films that a city is a place that's just as sprawling and unpredictable as it gets. i can't properly put it into words so i feel like these 3 quotes will better exemplify what i mean.

Source-http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

Source: Here

Source: Here

I'm also guilty of never really drawing what's around or in front of me, always trying to show the necessary qualities in a drawing, but i feel like learning to draw the gross, unappealing, yet genuine look of some things whether its people, animals, or certain environments is something i need to improve at, and since i'm already talking about my own personal art i might as well transition to my next topic.

Anime and Style

This may come off as pretentious but for the longest time i always tried to stay away from anime whenever i was drawing. Even though there's a ton of anime I like and some of my biggest inspirations are artists like Go Nagai and Katsuhiro Otomo, manga and anime is something I just attempted to look the other way to. The real reason for this is in hopes it made my style stick out more, whenever i heard people talk about Trigger or Gainax or wherever big anime or manga artist are out there, there was always this voice in my head going " God these people are idiots, why can't anybody today look at artists like Milton Caniff or Bruce Timm or Alex Toth"-as well as believing more and more artist opting for a more "anime" art style and a less western one, i even looked as some Euro comics just on the basis that it was European and not Japanese art. Looking back it was pretty damn lame and i should learn to embrace different styles and artists in the future regardless if they are Japanese or not. Recently I feel I haven't been the draftsmen i thought i was and understand that I need to learn real principles like perspective, anatomy, and posing and not just rely on quirks from other artist. There's this Shane Glines presentation and he basically said in one part that he always took certain quirks from different artists and that never really felt genuine to him. Here's the clip for anyone interested Youtube.

Theres also this fantastic spumdonor tweet that i couldn't agree more on

My Goals

Another recent thing is that I feel like I do a lot of flip flop from what i think is cool. One day i could see a really realistic and heavily shaded piece of animation and think "I wanna do that one day, that's my end goal" and the next I see some really cartoony and exaggerated piece of animation and think the same exact thing. The whole reason i even started my own personal animation playlist so i couldn't have to scroll through hundreds of my likes just to see something I thought looked cool again. If I always try to imitate or replicate some of my favorite artists but i never really try to draw with my own flow, and with my birthday passing recently i now have this need to improve as much as i can before my next birthday. There's this think one of my friends said that was along the lines of " When i draw i don't compare myself to other artists, i try to compare myself to my art the year before" and I feel like that's a much more personal and honest way of drawing. there's always this idea that everyone is better, you need to imitate or do what everyone else iis doing but I feel like it's appropriate to close of this post with probably one of the most inspiring pieces of advice i've read by Shane Glines.

Sorry of this came of as rambely, just needed to get my ideas out there quickly, anyways cya.