On a sleep-deprived morning in early-mid April, I stumbled across this Scott Christian Sava art video, which then pointed me to this SamDoesArts tutorial video. The tutorial video is a response to the online trend – in late March/early April – of people using a particular A.I. site to turn photos, screenshots etc… into something resembling a Studio Ghibli anime film.
The point of SamDoesArts’ tutorial video was to show that you don’t need A.I. to draw in this particular anime art style, because of its relative simplicity. This simplicity makes sense because, if these films are animated by hand, then someone has to draw thousands upon thousands of frames (and, anything that speeds the process up...).
And I actually tried to follow this tutorial. Because, whilst I was curious about what I’d look like in the “Ghibli” style, I am in absolutely no hurry whatsoever to use the dreaded text-generator site (with added image generator) in question. A year or two ago, a relative had the site open and asked me to try it out… I wrote one test prompt (a heavy metal song in a Shakespearean style) and the sheer speed that it belched out the results scared me away.
For context, I had to start a second fan art/art journal sketchbook to rebuild my confidence in my own art after messing around with a semi-decent image generator in 2023, and I don’t know what the writing equivalent of that would be. So, to maintain my confidence in my own writing, I’m avoiding text-based A.I sites like the plague! Of course, actually being able to satisfy my curiosity in another way – using actual real art! – seemed too good not to try.
(And, yes, I know that the proper way to learn a style is to study lots of examples of it, work out the underlying “rules” behind it etc… on your own. But, well, I was tired, so I just followed the easy Youtube tutorial...).
I was using a small watercolour-compatible sketchbook. The initial sketch was in 4H pencil, then I inked it with about two or three waterproof ink rollerball and fine-liner pens (of different line widths), then applied colour using watercolour pencils and went over it a wet painbrush. When the paint had dried, I scanned, resized and cropped it using Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6, before editing it further using GIMP 2.10.30 and MS Paint 5.1. Here’s the process and the result:
(Click for larger image) Here are some screenshots of the process and the final result. It looked freaky!
Like in Scott Christian Sava’s video, I felt a bit freaked out by the results. If you’re an amateur or professional artist who has practiced long enough to develop your own style, then exercises like this will freak you out. I think it’s the “uncanny valley” effect – when something looks both familiar and different in an unsettling way.
(On a side-note: This is especially freaky for me because, whilst my style isn’t an anime one, some mild past influences on it have included the 1990s “Pokémon” anime and, during the late 2000s, the “Cowboy Bebop” manga too. So, there’s a tiny bit of anime in my style already, but not this particular version of it…)
Even if you follow the tutorials to the letter, then you are probably going to instinctively add parts of your own familiar style to whatever you are drawing or painting. It can be subtle things, like how you handle colour, or how you draw hair, it can even be the exact mixture of materials that you use etc… And this results in a weird, uncanny hybrid of your own style and someone else’s which just seems… freaky… to look at.
But, ultimately, this is how your style develops and evolves. You try to draw in another style and either fail or, if you’ve learnt another style before, make a weird mixture of styles. This continues until eventually, you have a unique art style…. Which then makes trying to draw in any other styles feel weird. In fact, this “Does it feel weird?” thing might even be a good test to see when you’ve arrived at your style.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
