Some concept art.

Just some character designs for the comic I'm working on. the girl's called Lydia a shepherd and unlikely heroine, the guy with the bow is Lars who sees himself as something of a hero.

Style and Line

Over the past year or so I have found myself becoming attracted to styles that exaggerate the forms existing in nature to create an emotional reaction, it makes me wonder what it is exactly that creates this - a subversion of our expectations perhaps? obviously such a result is present in most art but this can as easily be repulsive as appealing. 

linework is something which communicates so much, A line can carry so much feeling that it could express an emotion devoid of context, yet is this most simple of artistic concepts given enough thought? 

previously not, on my part,

the things I would first scrutinise when looking upon a picture would be the sense of depth and believability achieved through an understanding of construction, perspective, anatomy, gesture and composition as a direct result of my own focus on these principles, the fundamentals without which any style is just so much decoration, wallpaper.

Yet as I come to realize the importance of the more superficial layers of the mind blowingly complex onion that is Art I begin to think that those principles are really a means to an end, the grammar of a language. and that the message that is communicated through an artists work is largely made from an inventive deviation with what is expected.

in Mike Mignola and Claire Wendling's work there is a profound understanding of the use of line in portraying a feeling, Mignola's style is agressive and kinetic in the extreme while Wendling's is beautifully lyrical and succeeds in expressing a variety of emotions. yet I find in a way the two styles fundamentally similar in their principles, the contrast and balance of lines in their work and a clean look which is not concerned with detail, the use of straight to curve may be nothing new but the way these artists work with the concept is quite different to anything else out there I have previously seen, so I'm trying to understand what it is that attracts me so much to this look and implement it in my own work.