Well, I thought that I’d talk about three lazy art tricks and why – although they limit your art – they can also make it look better than it otherwise would do. A lot of these involve covering up, avoiding or compensating for any gaps or weaknesses in your artistic knowledge or skill. Yes, all three things have “legitimate” uses – but they’re also the sort of thing which artists can find themselves leaning on if they’re less experienced, in a rush or feeling uninspired or whatever.
And, just for laughs, here’s a quick digitally-edited painting I made which includes all three of them:
1) Emo Hair: I’ve written a whole article about this one, but it involves covering up one of your characters’ eyes with their hair. This hairstyle is most well-known thanks to emo fashion from the 2000s, but there are certainly more “traditional” hairstyles which you can incorporate it into. And it will often make your characters look slightly better, but why?
Simply put, it avoids the tricky problem of eye alignment. If you’re drawing someone, it can be very easy to accidentally place one of their eyes a few millimetres higher or lower than their other eye. It isn’t always noticeable at a glance, but it often results in a distorted picture if you mirror or flip your artwork.
So, by covering up one of your character’s eyes with hair, the audience will just automatically assume that the covered eye is perfectly level with the one that they can see. It’s a good artistic “trick”, but it also limits you to drawing characters with longer hair. And, if you over-use it, then people are probably going to notice. So, it’s probably worth practicing more or drawing guide-lines with pencil or something like that. And, yes, I’m still not perfect with this – look closely at the small cartoon/graphic at the very beginning of the article for an example.
2) Blue/Orange: There is nothing inherently wrong with using a blue/orange palette and it is a common and popular palette for a good reason. As well as being a dramatic complementary colour pair, it is also the perfect example of contrasting warm and cool colours for dramatic effect. It is a good-looking palette which has almost universal appeal.
Still, if you don’t really understand colour theory or haven’t really had much practice or experience with choosing palettes, then it can be easy to just go for the basic blue/orange one. Again, it isn’t a bad palette. But, at the same time, you’ll be limited to just one palette if you rely on this one. And you can do so much more with palettes than just this one.
But if you don’t know about complementary colours, colour wheels, warm colours, cool colours etc… yet, then “blue/orange” is a quick shortcut that will guarantee that your painting’s palette will look dramatic and visually-interesting. But, again, relying on it too heavily will limit your art. It’s a good “beginner’s” palette, but it makes it more difficult to express emotions or moods through colour (though you can do a bit of it with this, depending on whether you add more orange or more blue).
3) Weapons: Yes, there can be legitimate artistic reasons for including swords, guns etc… in your artwork. What I’m talking about here is when an inexperienced artist just randomly adds them to a piece of art for the sake of “drama” or “because it’s cool”. And, yes, this will improve your art – but it’s also a bit of a lazy “cheat”, which covers up a lack of experience with visual storytelling.
Visual storytelling is what makes art dramatic, interesting or compelling. It adds life to your art. It’s when you make a piece of art look like a frame from a film. Where – in a single wordless image – you hint at a story. For example, you might show a character opening a letter and looking shocked. You might show two characters looking at each other in a particular way. You might show someone looking oddly serene in the middle of a busy city street.
Visual storytelling, when it is at its best, is often fairly subtle. And there are certainly times when including weapons is an integral part of the “story” of a piece of art. If you were making a painting of a swashbuckling pirate, then you’d probably want to put a cutlass on their belt or in their hand. If you were making a “roaring twenties” painting, then what is an old-fashioned gangster without their tommy-gun?
In these examples, the weapons are there for the sake of visual shorthand and/or characterisation. There are certainly legitimate visual storytelling reasons for including weapons in art. But these have to actually make sense in context and they aren’t always the primary focus of the storytelling either.
But, if an artist has less experience with visual storytelling, then it can be very easy to just throw in a random pistol or sword or machine-gun or dagger or whatever. Because these things are associated with the action, crime, thriller etc… genres and because their very presence implies some sort of danger, then it can be a quick and lazy substitute for visual storytelling. It certainly looks dramatic, but if you over-use it or don’t add a surrounding context which explains why the characters are carrying weapons, then it can come across as slightly immature or “edgy for the sake of edgy”.
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Anyway, I hope that this was useful