>>7718572
I tried compiling some art that I like and categorising it based on the brushwork style. There seems to be 4 categories that I like:
- Abstract painterly (like craig mullins, yuming li). Lots of edge and brush variation and rarely uses lineart.
- A sort of painterly but cleaner style that uses textured brushes and usually you can see the brushstrokes. Theres usually some sort of lineart
- Very cleanly rendered stuff that uses airbrush and has very few visible brushstrokes. The lighting seems to be a bit flatter for stuff like this and it seems to be gently coloured in lineart.
- Pen and ink style rendering, where the forms are described with lines rather than edges.
Interestingly, the more abstract the brushwork is, the more 'serious' the art feels. Alot of the cleaner stuff I like is basically goonslop artists. Makes me wonder if I genuinely like the clean look or just like decently rendered ass.

I tried to paint 3 apples using the first 3 styles. I don't know why but it felt really uncomfortable, even though I've painted fruit before. It's alot worse than the fruits I drew a few years ago. I found the painterly style was the most forgiving. The airbrushing was the most uncomfortable and I couldn't control it at all, it looks like a flat mess to me. The in between is closest to how I draw usually I think, but I sometimes add texture with lines like in the 4th style. I think all three apples are seriously needing improvement so I might just need to keep grinding fundies before bothering with this style study stuff.

Sorry for such a long post.

TLDR: The brushwork doesn't matter if you can't draw or paint to begin with.