We had discussed before, the most powerful argument for Truth is reality. After all, we all live in it. When we render a painting, we are asking our audience to believe in what we say, by telling them it’s real.

But that goes both ways. The ultimate goal of the artist is to say something so Truthful, it feels real. We call this verisimilitude.

These drawings are not “real.” The top one is heavily outlined, and the bottom one is under-rendered.

Yet, why do the painted sushi look more lifelike than life?

The artists have carefully organized the information of the picture, to make the sushi appeal to you.

These paintings that you are looking at are the results of hundreds of years of refinement in the art style of “realism”

Today, we’re going to take a brief walk through history and talk about the evolution of art styles, as well as the technology behind them!

Back in the day, portraits served a very practical purpose.

They told you what the person looked like. Kind of like our identification photos today.

In the 17th century, visual data was very sparse. If you can get an artist to draw you a very attractive portrait, then you are that very attractive person.

Much of the Tudors’ England is seen through the lens of Hans Holbein the Younger. You may know him from this famous painting.

Can you see the Easter Egg?

There’s a skull hidden on the floor. While the skull is the most famous part, the painting is full of easter eggs. Notice the shelf between the two figures. The top shelf represents the heavens. So instruments on the top shelf: the celestial globe, the sundial, represent instruments measuring time and heaven. Meanwhile, the bottom shelf represents the earth, and contains things of worldly affairs: a math book, a musical instrument, a terrestrial globe.

The lute even has one broken string, to represent the discord between church and state.

Holbein styled reality with a meticulous eye!

Notice the difference in his treatment of these subjects:

A noble lady

A mythical figure

His own family

A queen

And once Holbein painted you, this representation remains who you are in the eyes of history. After all, there’s no counterargument that could refute this “ID picture”

And so, as “realistic” as they were, these portraits became the fantastical mask of the person being portrayed.

Nowhere was this more salient than the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I of England.

For example, this was an early portrait of Elizabeth I, before she became the queen.

And like most monarchs, she had many images made of herself in this fashion, throughout her rule.

But then something started happening around this painting. The artist’s name is lost to time, but this famous work is known as the Darnley portrait.

It seems as if after this painting, Queen Elizabeth I’s PR department decided that anime is the best image befitting a monarch. They decorated the queen in fantastical costumes and jewels, reminiscent of mythology.

This one, the most famous, celebrates the defeat of the Spanish armada

Looking at a portrait like that, I wouldn’t be surprised if she could reach her hand to the sky and cast “Meteor.” Doubtless, this is the image she wished to convey to her subjects.

The type of pictures produced in Elizabethan England is a reflection of the method of production. To get an image made, a sitter would have to come to multiple sessions. Also, as we mentioned in the Jesus lesson, the paints themselves costed a fortune.

Yet, despite the different in production methods, artists back then were still focused on the same goal as artists today: the desire to retell reality into a more beautiful and grand Truth. These portraits of Elizabeth I were made roughly 400 years ago, but it is striking to me how much the design would still work for the final boss of a videogame in modern times.

It took artists Elizabeth I’s entire lifetime to develop her “style”, and much of what these portraits innovated on remains grounded in subject matter, rather than artistic technique.

Things were going to get a lot faster, and the explosion of what we refer to as “style” in modern times was on the horizon.

Fast forward to the 19th century, a marvelous invention was sweeping the world: tube paints.

If old paintings look stuffy to you, it’s because they were literally painted inside, for the most part. Even for multi-character paintings with an outdoor background, artists would have models come in to their studios, so they could draw them one by one.

This made techniques like chiaoscuro popular, because the studio would likely have been set up for simple, single source lighting. (and before modern lighting, indoors would have been generally darker)

Suddenly, with their new, portable tube paints, artists could take their work outside:

And they took their paints everywhere.

To parties:

To ponds:

to ballet class, even

This technique, plein air, inspired a great change in the field of art. Colors got brighter. Lighting conditions became more complex.

If you’ve ever tried drawing outside, you quickly realize that the conditions are hard to control. light that was there one moment is suddenly gone the next. Things move and shift. Children playing on the beach do not stop to pose for your pictures.

And so it became important to capture the momentary, ephemeral feeling, rather than the details. Artists learned to draw a lot faster.

This looseness of technique made its way back into portraiture:

Compared to earlier works, Sargent’s portraits look extremely alive, because rather than spending time carving out reality, he painted the Truth.

But the fact remains that it’s hard to get the details right, if they’re in flux like this. After all, if you told a model to go out into the woods dressed like a Grecian goddess , she’d get cold pretty quickly. If you painted her quickly before she got cold, then you won’t get the details right.

But if you had a camera, you can have her romp around the fields for a bit, and get all the shots you need, before you go back into your studio to paint.

Which is exactly what John William Waterhouse did, at the turn of the 20th century, when the camera was ascending in popularity.

By the time of Norman Rockwell, reference photography had become an art

If you get the feeling that Waterhouse’s paintings look like colored photographs, you’re quite right. Not only is the contrast very photographic feeling, the way that the shots are framed also bears marks of the reference used.

Notice the background objects: the pots, the chairs, the bricks.

A Renaissance painter would have carefully placed allegorical objects, since paintings took a long time to make.

An Impressionist painter would have changed them into amorphous daubs of color, since they only had a brief moment to capture the light.

But Waterhouse painted them exactly as they appear in the photo he took of them. They have neither intense meaning nor are they intensely abstracted. They are simply askew flower pots, chairs, and bricks. Some of them are even falling off the frame.

It’s also worth noting that he would have had held a very different camera.

Though we don’t have the exact reference shots, Waterhouse’s photographs would have looked more like this:

Compare that to Rockwell’s photographs: you can see the advancements in camera technology in the illustration!

Nowadays, artists on digital media take photo referencing to the next level.

Although they share the quality of “realism,” today’s “realism” is so much more sophisticated than the “realism” of olden times. When we look at a modern picture, we see the traces of all the cultural and technological improvements humanity has made folded within!

As AI evolves, and artists begin to use niji as reference, I wonder what kind of new stylistic flavors they’ll bring to the world!

The purpose of this is ultimately to present a certain viewpoint of the world. Given the variety of ways humans have discovered to style reality, an art “style” is a subset of those techniques that a particular artist has chosen to adopt. The final result is a mix of the artist’s preferred subject matter with their preferred art technique.

Waterhouse-verse is a celtic, Athurian fantasy

Sorolla-verse is a summer by the Spanish Sea

Rockwell-verse is idyllic 60s America

It’s interesting to note that Sorolla-verse does not extend beyond the beach, neither does Waterhouse-verse exist outside of the meadow. They don’t need to, in the same way that the town of Hogsmead in Harry Potter is but one street, but that is enough for us to smell the butter beer and see the chocolate frogs.

Art seeks to capture Truth, and the Truth of the human experience has a temporal dimension. Eventually, comics, an artform of sequential pictures was invented.

However, at the quantity it takes to tell a story, the production of realistic pictures would be too burdensome. It was necessary to develop a simpler notation.

An illustrator of note in this history is Osamu Tezuka. His Magnum Opus, Phoenix, was written over the span of 34 years of his life. Through Phoenix, We can clearly see the development of his shorthand notation.

He started with the Disney notation in 1954, with simple, elastic curved lines, suitable for animation.

By the final volume of phoenix in 1988, his stylization was decidedly closer to what we think of as “manga.”

He invented the modern day cat girl

We can clearly see the influence of his stylization in subsequent works, like Rumiko Takahashi’s dog boy

And at some point, it became natural to incorporate all sorts of animal ears into the designs of anime characters, which is a pretty wild concept, if you stop and think about it.

The most recent addition to the pantheon has been horse characters:

Niji has certainly taken notice of our fondness for animal-eared characters!

Without any basis in real world objects, the styles being pioneered by today’s artists are akin to building towers in the sky! We are doing the unbelievable: presenting Truths which exist outside of reality.

Once an art student has mastered the essentials of rendering, the common journeyman question is, “what is my style”? “What is the unique way I interpret reality”?

It’s a deceptively hard question to answer, because it’s being framed the wrong way. Anybody can make up a style, but it may not be a good one. A clearer framing might be “How do I style reality in a way that other people don’t generally do, yet allows other people to understand it?”

And that of course, is paradoxical. If the audience have seen it before, then they’re more likely to understand it. But if they understand it, then it must borrow elements from what others have done before, so it is not original.

This, “original” style is hard to invent, by its definition. When it comes down to it, one artist’s style stands head and shoulders above all else.

It is a move of sheer advertising genius that Picasso took the entirety of abstract shapes. Nowadays, if an artist draws like this, people will say it’s Picasso. So, with that taken out of the equation, the rest of us must be more subtle about developing a personal style.

To that end, I have one piece of advice: it is the same one that I’ve been repeating throughout the course. Study the art that you like.

The instruction may sound simple, but there’s some subtlety to it.

it is the difference from what you want to say and what you want to hear.

And just like in communication, you will learn the best by stopping for a moment to listen.

This is an interesting style exercise:

Open that downloads folder or likes tab, or repost list, or wherever you keep track of your art, and look for the commonalities for the last 20 or so images you’ve clicked the save/heart on.

Have you found it?

That is the art that you like. Many people find it shocking that it’s not the concepts that they like, or the art that they make.

This art is the best place to start studying: The original artist has already put in a lot of a labor for the message to reach you, so this picture contains a lot of the hidden patterns that will make it understandable to others.

Once you have internalized those patterns, then you can construct your own concepts from those copies. Your “style” naturally emerges from that combination of concepts that you want to express (the art that you make, the concepts that you like), and the hidden patterns of the art that has reached you.

Most of my job involves making anime characters, but, of all the characters I’ve ever designed, blk cat, the non anime, non human, non ml-illustrated cat is the most popular. This was entirely unintentional. Looking back, I think it’s because I’m abnormally moved by pictures of round, small animals.

In terms of finding your own style, focus on being Truthful to your own ears, instead of making what you think sounds Truthful to others.

After all, no man is an island. If you’ve truly managed to make the perfect picture for you, it is bound to resonate for others.

Whether you ultimately decide to make human art or AI art, or some combination of both, I encourage you to go out, touch some grass, and bring your own clod of reality into the artistic main.

Make art for yourself and you’ll always be happy!

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