Finding Your Illustration Style - Animal Illustrations by George Tonks

most established artists have a unique style that fans admire add that can be easily recognized if you are planning to become an illustrator or digital artist you will most likely one the same to define your own art style and to ensure that your art stands out in this video I will demonstrate how to achieve this by analyzing the work of George tongs a young and talented illustrator [Applause] [Music] I instantly became a big fan of George's work the first time I saw his portfolio at a Behance review event that we hosted and since then he became one of the top talent of 2019 selected by Adobe and his Instagram account is also getting a lot of love deservedly so now we already sat down once with him and we have that video here on the channel if you want just check it out it's in the show your work playlist and the link is also in the description below but this time I'm going to take closer look at his work examples of all the different animal illustrations that he is popular and famous for but the main thing I'm looking for really is the answer to how he found his style and that is probably the most difficult thing and most complex thing that as an artist or as a creative you are challenged with so here's some of the images that we will be looking at in this review and starting with this process where we can see the original sketch so the final work is this one I'm just going to show you the veil and the squid this fight between these two animals and then we can see that the original sketch already is very well establishing the composition and that's one of the things that I wanted to get to in this video that if you are good at planning your work most likely you will be able to get to a very well-defined composition in the beginning even with your rough sketch so if you have a good plan or idea and you commit to it normally you will be able to produce more work and also your work will be more recognizable so having a good plan having something that you commit to and usually a solid sketch is something that I normally mentioned that you should always strive for so let's see what was George's next step so from this rough sketch on paper was then taken into a digital format and in procreate he is drawing over it and constructing all these lines now you can see that he's very meticulously constructing everything so it's very geometric and we have lots of sharp angles straight lines and these very nicely constructed round corners or radius around the edges but from this we get the cleaner result here we can see better the outlines and then we get the base colors and then some textures and then finally we have all the additional details added here now in this case George not only had the rough sketch really close to the final result but he even knew the colors that he's going to use so notice the sketch here saying the Vale is going to be green black background here is his saying and then the squid is red so even the color theme or palette was established in the original concept now of course this is not always the case with this other example here I'm going to again show you the sketch and the final result next to each other we have a lot of different variations of colors so he was not 100% sure what color theme he should work with and we can see his research for the project so he found so many different color variations that he was thinking of using and then we can also see him experimenting with these so I'm just going to show you these three variations so once he had the outlines he did very quick sketches just adding some paint and experimenting with different variations and that exploration is sometimes part of the process for George but even though he was experimenting with colors the original sketch was once again really close to the final result so it shows a very solid plan that he started with now I believe that the two biggest goals and challenges of all creatives and including illustrators are to find their unique style something that is recognizable so a certain look that is established as their own and to create appealing art design or any kind of work and this can be very difficult so first of all to stand out and be unique in today's world is really difficult we are constantly bombarded with all kinds of visuals and it is really hard to get people's attention let alone to have them recognize your work and also it is very difficult to define what is going to be appealing to your audience whether you are trying to reach a broader audience or just a smaller group it's still important to understand what makes your work appealing to get answers for these difficult questions it's best to look at emerging talented artists because they are still exploring different styles and they are trying to find their voice and their way in the career but also thanks to social media we can follow really which of their work gets more likes and more attention from their followers so we are living in a very connected world and it helps artists to get more exposure but also to guide them in understanding what works and what their audience is interested in of course it can also be discouraging if you are not getting that many followers and you're not getting likes or comments on the work that you share but persistence is key of course like in everything in case of George he has been sharing his work for many years before it got recognized and now finally he's getting all the followers but make sure you check out his Instagram account but he's also doing regularly drew this in your style challenges so he posts an image of one of his recent work and then selects the best art sent to him by his followers so just as an example the leopard that I've already showed you earlier was recreated by all of these other artists I'm just going to show you a few of them and these are screenshots from his Instagram account and they are all really similar in terms of colors and composition but still we can see that the style of each artist is different that's the cool thing about art is that everyone is going to create something unique because their style is a combination of all the influences that they have and all the experiences that they had so one of the answers to the question that how to find your style is that you don't need to look for it because it's already with you so everyone has already a style the challenge is more about refining your style so just to prove this to you let's take a look at some of George's earlier work where his unique signature style is already noticeable but it's not a hundred percent crystallized yet so here he is already doing recognizable and familiar animals in strange poses and exaggerated proportions vivid vibrant colors and of course he's achieving this by extensively studying animals and their behavior so just as another example his understanding of bears in particular comes from all of these studies and the illustrations that he did in the past so I'm just going to flick through some of these quickly and you can see there's loads of different styles and explorations here but essentially this shows his understanding of the anatomy and behavior of this particular animal he even gets up close and personal sometimes with these animals and don't ask me about this photo this is on his Instagram account maybe message him to find out more about this encounter but let me show you a more recent example of a bear illustration by George and when you look at this you will notice that the original traits from the previous illustrations are still there but he's much more confident in using these bold shapes and colors so we can clearly see an evolution here from the left to the right from doing simple animal studies to ending up creating these highly stylized exaggerated and as simplified illustrations of animals and to get back to the other question that we asked on how to make your work appealing I think in his case the appeal lies in seeing organic natural curvy shapes of animals in this stylized constructed geometric forms so why is this appealing but first of all because geometric shapes are just perfect and it's great to look at them but also somehow George finds to combine these shapes and still make these characters recognizable especially in today's world you need to be able to get people's attention you want them to look at your work at least for a couple of seconds that's already an achievement and if they are interested they will probably keep scrolling and keep ranking and keep following eventually your work so hopefully this explanation is going to help you to find your own style and more importantly it will inspire you to sit down and do some drawings and if you are like George and you love drawing animals and you want to get really good at it then I have a couple of book recommendations for which the links are in the description below but we also have a blog post about this topic which goes into much more detail but I'm going to show you these couple of books that I think are just great and really inspired me to draw animals so one of them is Chris Ayers daily zoo series this is definitely something to check out very inspiring then there is the brilliant book of Ken Hall grants the art of animal drawing and in one of the books from Terryl Whitlatch one of the best artists drawing animals in my opinion this one in particular is a brilliant one that's worth checking out and most recently the Masters of anatomy came out with drawing animals book which is also great and raoul moreno shows brilliant characterizations of animals in it studying from these artists and others and also doing as much drawings as possible is what's going to get you results and that eventually is going to lead to that we find an established style that you can see with emerging artists like George thanks again for watching and I wish you all the best on your creative journey thanks a lot for watching like and share this video if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified whenever we release new videos click on the link on my right and start your membership today to get access to over 200 hours of training courses and personal mentoring by me and my team of creative professionals have fun learning guys and I will see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Yes I'm a Designer

Views: 36,405

Keywords: Finding Your Illustration Style - Animal Illustrations by George Tonks, finding your illustration style, animal illustrations, George Tonks, finding your art style, art style, how to find art style, art styles, illustrator, digital artist, graphic design, illustration style, art advice for beginners, art styles for beginners, art style tips, illustration style tutorial, types of illustration styles, finding your own art style, how to find your art style, adobe illustrator

Id: hy8J2hiUZ2s

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Mon May 04 2020