I’ve been thinking about my drawing style again lately.

I’ve had a fairly recognizable black and white ligne-claire style for a long time, and it’s still my go-to style when I sketch something out quickly. But for the longest time I wanted to get good at color. Dimme McWood taught me a lot about silhouettes and color harmonies, and the past few years I’ve been experimenting with it a lot more as you may have seen.

I think it goes hand in hand with my gamedev skills improving, to where I can simulate the real world a lot more accurately. And so I’ve been doing that in my 2D work as well, getting more detailed and working with light and shadow a lot more. But that style, it doesn’t really feel like me yet. In particular, sometimes it looks like a photo at a glance. So I’m experimenting with ways to bring these two things back together, and in doing so, finding a sort of recognizable cohesion that binds my work together again.

Today I feel like I got a step closer to that while working on this image. I started with color shapes, added detailed lighting but avoided blending it too much, kept the face details abstract, and at the very end added the outlines, and I like this a lot more than what I’ve been making lately. So I’m going to keep ‘driving down this road’!