Digital art styles, whether traditional or contemporary, always influence all artists to build up their core art skills and inspire them in their exploration to produce their own signature styles. Here are some styles to help you strengthen your basic skills and techniques, and eventually develop your own unique style.
Key Takeaways:
You would not see this coming because SamDoesArts, an art influencer with 1.86 million subscribers, expresses that the obsession over art styles tends to divert people’s and artists’ attention from the foundation of those styles, which is realism. By imitating reality correctly, you will then get the freedom to give your art a twist.
So, explore the number one on this list below, especially if you are an artist, before diving deeper into the pretty styles you often see on social media. If not, you can skip the realism and find out more about the style in number two to number ten.
Realism teaches all artists to learn and implement the details of objects or subjects as they appear in our eyes. In other words, you must understand proportions and anatomy before diving into more complicated techniques, like depth, values, and occlusion transition, by using charcoal, pencil, or other art supplies of your selection.
Also Read: Digital Art for Beginners: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
Kooleen shares that semi-realism is quite varied, but the basic understanding is that it involves realistic proportions and is coloring-focused. So, deepen your skills in proportions, with a little bit of exaggeration, like big or dreamy eyes, along with your implementation of color theory, such as different values and contrast.
The Big Red illustration shares that cartoons rely on your simplification and imagination, often the hyperbolic one. No need to focus on detailed features, just the basic outline of shapes, like a long chin that surprisingly can drop to the ground.
Also, this is one of the popular digital art styles that always pays attention to bright colors and overlooks shading.
KeshArt observes that drawing manga or anime style invites you to focus on hard edges and angles, or the attributes of triangles. Apart from that, sometimes you need to focus on accurate proportions, especially if you draw serious-themed manga. Last but not least is the depiction of ink-like shading.
Pixel art brings alive the aesthetic appeal of old games that show low resolution due to the technology of the past. To create one, Saultoons recommends using shadow in order to get the rough shape of your character or artwork before going into details. And do not forget to use jaggies, or lines that have pixels, aka are not smooth.
Also Read: How to Make Pixel Art: Step Guide to Create Sprites
Vector arts always apply mathematical formulas and build artworks by using geometrical approaches on rectangles, squares, lines, points, and curves. Adobe even mentions that vector art’s resolution always remains in all sizes. That is why logos and business cards often use vectors rather than other digital art styles.
Unless you have a photographic memory, concept artists truly need references or digital art styles for prompts to help them bring concept ideas and storylines into a rough visual representation to impress film or game directors. But, as Artchive reports, you should be able to draw backgrounds, like mountain views.
Matte painting goes way back to the 1800s, when filmmakers asked painters to paint extensive backgrounds on glass screens for their films, as realistically as possible, to blend in with the actors. In digital, nothing is much different, other than helpful features to manipulate background photos, like Blur and Layer Mask in Photoshop.
Also Read: My Character Design Art Portfolio: How to Make with Example
Three-dimensional art is absolutely advanced digital sculpting. You build lifelike characters or shapes from nothing by using shapes and geometrical lines. Some artists even produce realistic representations, like imitating the shadows, colors, and movements in real life with software, such as Blender and Autodesk Maya.
Like the traditional one, abstract art is free art. There are no strict rules, but it often expresses certain emotions and messages through shapes, lines, forms, color combinations, and gestural marks drawn with various brushes. In the demonstration done by Flow Works, you can see him use a charcoal and carbon black brush.
Also Read: 20 Funny Prompts for AI Art Generator, Let’s Get Silly!
Digital art styles are actually varied but genuinely rooted in realism. But no one masters them in the blink of an eye. You will be improving in time. However, your digital artworks must be secured from online theft. Use unique fonts for digital arts from StringLabs Creative to mark your art and prevent it from getting stolen.
