When I first started drawing at 11 years old, I was very passionate about manga and anime. I wanted to become as good as my favorite artists. So, I put a lot of effort into learning how to draw like them. I learned to draw with the G-Pen and Maru-Pen, to do cleaner, thinner lines, and I looked for the smoothest paper so those lines could really shine. My favorite thing to draw with was my Steadtler Mars micro 0,5mm mechanical pencil, and later I even switched to inking my art with the Faber Castell PITT Artist Pen in 0,1mm. Consequently, the lines got even thinner. Here is an example that I drew for a study on hypnosis.

Early in my art journey, I made a couple of decisions that foreshadowed my current conundrum with my art. One was that I started to mix the Japanese manga elements with European ones to create something of my own. The downside of this is that you are neither one nor the other, and it did not seem to resonate with people when I uploaded my art online. Not as much as the art style I use for psychoSoph. This would not be a big issue if I just drew to entertain myself, but – as you can see with this picture – I started working as a professional science illustrator on the side (see my science illustration stuff here, German-language). This means I now care for the marketability of my art.

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with manga. I still read manga and watch anime. But I have also talked to other science artists, and a lot of them agree with me that mangaesque art is not ideal if I want to sell science illustration locally in Germany. One of them told me that my art style and my target group diverge significantly (I agree with them). And even though my art has evolved to look much less manga-like, manga is what many people seem to associate with my art first when they see my drawings. I think it is the way I draw eyes.

At the same time, I got enormously bored with my own art. This created a lack of motivation that led to me drawing almost nothing besides psychoSoph in the last two years and consequently uploading nothing on Soph’s Sketchpad either. I felt I was just doing the same thing over and over again. And I started to get annoyed at my very thin lines, too. 

There are three reasons for that. The first is that I have been seeing lots of gorgeous art and fan art that have thicker lines and looser coloring. They have a certain expression you cannot get with thinner lines. I want to be able to do that. The second is that when I watch anime, the current art styles don’t resonate with me as much. Some have ultra-thin lines that almost disappear. It allows for a lot more detail and beautiful still frames, but the characters lose physicality in the animation. Older anime, like Sailor Moon, despite the simpler animation and designs, seemed a lot more alive. The third is that the thin lines are really strenuous on my eyes and hands. They take a lot of time and care to draw, and I get tired quickly.

The thing is, when your art does not vibe with people, and you are bored and annoyed with it yourself, it is time to change something. And I want to. Many artists have recommended to me that I need to experiment with other media, especially media that prevent me from being so clean and planned. Here comes the problem: I want to do that, but it is such an integral part of my artist identity that I am the one who does these thin, precise lines that it is really hard to encourage myself to do anything else.

The last couple of days, I was able to look at other artists’ sketchbooks, and what I noticed was how freely they experimented. I do not. That has partly to do with my personality, I guess, but partly also because of the way I trained myself to draw. The thing is that manga can be very rigid. You train to become good with ink. You do not necessarily train to work out of the box artistically. So, it takes quite a leap for me to change that.

Anyhow, I got tips and encouragement from all the other artists I talked to (Thank you, everyone!). They told me to take it slow, one step at a time. They gave me prompts I want to work on. They encouraged me to do the fan art that I am not allowing myself to draw. They told me experimenting doesn’t mean I can’t still do my thin lines sometimes or that people won’t commission them. They told me that my usual precision can actually be good for some types of science illustration. And they gave me lots of ideas for media to experiment with, so I can try to get out of my comfort zone.  

You saw and are seeing the first results here with the blue face drawings and in the last post. A colleague recommended the KOH-I-NOOR 2mm colored mechanical pencils to me, and I have been drawing a lot with them since then. I feel that the lines come out a lot more relaxed and the expression is a lot better. The thinner lines allow for prettier detail, and I kind of miss the ability to draw all the details into the eyes that I usually do, but they can also be a little stiff sometimes (see the pencil drawings down here). I guess you have to decide what you want to focus on.  I am also experimenting with using the thicker pencils as a basis and coloring them in digitally. One of my goals from now on is also to work more with color and become better at it!

Just one thing: The KOH-I-NOOR pencils are quite hard. I’ve been drawing with them in my sketchbook on the smooth Bristol paper that I use for my ink drawings. You have to apply a lot of pressure with them on it. I promptly got a cramp in a muscle in my elbow that would come back for a couple of days. Use rougher paper when you draw with them. It is a lot easier.

Anyhow, I’m really excited to see where this takes me. I’m still procrastinating on art because all this made me develop a huge imposter syndrome around it. But I hope this will help me get back on track!