It’s crazy that the internet enables me to open up a browser and find art from amazing artists of exactly the subject that I’m trying to study. That’s insane! Style is so interesting, I love to sit here and synthesize.
In some ways, this whole process is what the AI sycophants claim their algorithm is doing— that artists are stealing and ripping of each other’s work anyway, what’s the difference if a machine does it? I suppose that’s where taste comes in. It’s not that I’m scraping every bear drawing on the internet—I’m selecting ones that sort of…speak to me? This is certainly a debate for another day so I won’t get into it further.
Some incredible bear sketches from Jesús Alonso Iglesias, a character designer on Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. I love how expressive / simple the lines are, despite it being pretty chunky and thick. I tend to favor thicker lines so it’s nice to see how that can be utilized effectively without it being too blocky.
A few Shiyoon Kim bears, as well as assorted ones from the Puss in Boots art book. Traditional art remains superior—There’s nothing like that texture from pencil on paper. Or color pastel or whatever he used.
An Oda bear character design, as well as a singular bear drawing from Anthony Holden.
So I’m honing in on the muzzle now, particularly the lips. I’ve typically just drawn the curve of the lip as a simple concave line but I think adding the reverse to break up the continuity of the line coming from the jaw adds a subtle complexity that results in a nicer design.
Tons of bear designs out there! Think I probably could’ve pulled even more but had to hold myself back. I could use a deep dive study on each of these artists on their own, and even there I’d have an encyclopedia’s worth of reference.
Reminds of me of a tweet (rip) that I saw some time back that went along the lines of “are you lazy? or are you comparing yourself against the creative output of literally the entire internet?” That struck me because … well, yes I do always feel like I should be drawing more, creating more, especially when I see so much stuff constantly being pumped out on the internet. But that is also the product of hundreds of thousands of millions of artists’ work over weeks, months, years.