WEEK 41 - Is it okay to change styles as an artist?
Hey HOMwork friends, Happy Friday!
For those of you just joining us, you can see 80+ past assignments in our Challenge Archive. No pressure to complete them all, but many of you have asked, so here you go!
This year, I’ve received a ton of questions about finding your style as an artist, but this recent one really stood out to me:
“Once I find my style, what happens if I get bored of it or want to try something new?”
My answer? It’s okay to try something new! Your style is not a fixed thing. It’s always evolving, whether you notice it or not (just think about how much your fashion sense has changed over the years). We’re constantly absorbing creative inspiration by just living our lives, and every time you sit down to create a new piece of work, your skills are improving subtly.
Trust me, I get the concern though. I’ve been doing hand lettering for 7 years now, and around year 3 I started to worry that my dimensional, digital style was becoming the only thing I was known for. So, I decided to shake things up a bit and start lettering in other mediums like chalk and paint.
Experimenting with a new medium is my favorite, simple way to give your style an instant refresh. I love it because you’re using your current ‘style’ that your audience is familiar with and just giving it a sprinkle of something new (to scratch your own creative itch). I’ve done this multiple times throughout my career so far, and I plan on doing it many more times in the future. I hope you will too!
This week, I’ve partnered with Adobe Drawing to bring you a fun assignment that celebrates this idea:
Left: an analog drawing I did in 2016. Right: recreated digitally in Adobe Fresco in 2019
FREE PHOTOSHOP BRUSHES!
We're mixing things up to give you a variety of creative freebies. This week, we've got two FREE Photoshop brushes for you to experiment with, courtesy of DesignCuts.
<< Click here to download them!
Your Assignment: Pick a piece of your past artwork and recreate it using a different medium!
The piece I chose to recreate was a drawing I made in a Gemma O’Brien workshop in 2016. I really like the simplicity of the B&W, but I wanted to see what would happen if I gave it a twist with texture, color, and a bit more of my current style.
The paint-like texture in my piece was created using the Live Oil Paint brushes in Adobe Fresco, the new iPad drawing app from Adobe. Click here to download it from the App Store for your iPad and try it out for yourself!
After you complete the assignment, share your "before" and "after" artwork on Instagram with the hashtag #HOMwork so we can see the results of everyone’s new medium experiments! And if you decide to use Adobe Fresco to recreate your piece, add the hashtag #RecreateWithFresco for a chance to have your work featured on @AdobeDrawing :)
Don’t forget to tag me @homsweethom and @AdobeDrawing in your posts so we don't miss your work! We’ll both be sharing our favorite submissions in our Stories all week long.
Can’t wait to see all of your refreshed, remixed and recreated styles!
