Is Simple Art Better Than Complex Art?

Yay! It’s a retro 1990s “Game Boy”-style drawing 🙂

For today, I thought that I’d look at whether simple art is better to make than complex art. This is one of those subjects where there aren’t really any “right” or “wrong” answers, just lots of different opinions.

But, that said, I make a lot of simple art and I think that it’s pretty awesome – so, I guess I should probably explain why……

For starters, simple art can be made fairly quickly and spontaneously. I’ve written about this whole topic in a lot more detail before but it only usually takes me between 30-120 minutes to finish a painting or a drawing because, amongst other things, I keep my art fairly simple.

What this means is that I can produce a lot of art in a relatively short amount of time, which – amongst other things – also means that I get to practice a lot more too.

Another reason why simple art is so awesome is because it focuses almost entirely on what is important about a picture or a scene. Yes, you can spend days adding lots of fine detail to a single picture, but most of your audience is probably only going to notice the most prominent parts of your picture when they look at it.

Ok, a few of them might take a closer look at all of the detail you’ve put into it, but most of them will probably just look at the entire picture for a few seconds and only notice the important parts.

As such, making simpler art that pretty much only includes the important parts of a picture and gives the illusion of detail in the rest of the picture (eg: using a lot of jagged lines in the background to represent a forest in the distance) means that you can save yourself a lot of wasted time and effort.

Yes, a small portion of your audience may find the lack of genuine detail to be annoying, but most people who look at your picture probably won’t even notice. In other words, it’s easy to fool people into thinking that you’re a better artist than you actually are if you make simpler art.

Yet another reason why simpler art is so brilliant is because it’s absolutely perfect for things like comics and webcomics. Although I don’t make nearly as many of these as I used to, they were one of the things which made me keep my art style relatively simple. Why?

Well, it all comes down to time and consistency. For starters, drawing a comic page will take you longer than making a “normal” drawing or “painting” for the simple reason that you’ll usually be drawing about 2-12 small pictures per page rather than one large one.

As such, keeping your art relatively simple means that you will still be able to produce your comic at a reasonable rate – which is important if you’re working to a schedule (eg: you’ve got a webcomic that is updated 3-7 times per week).

Not only that, using simpler art in your comic helps you to keep your art fairly consistent too. Because you will probably be re-drawing the same characters and settings again and again in your comic, keeping your art fairly simple means that it’s easier to make sure that everything and everyone looks like they’re supposed to in every panel.

One of the only downsides of making simple art is that you’ll probably get some criticism if you become successful. I mean, we’ve all seen at least one famous book series (like the “Purple Ronnie” books or those books by Edward Monkton) which has ridiculously simple art – and I can guess that your first reaction to them was almost certainly something like: “How the hell is this so famous? I could make better art than that when I was seven!”

However, this isn’t as much of an issue as you might think. If you’re making a webcomic, then your audience will have lower expectations about your art than you might think (so it’s easier to impress them). But, if you’re making a book or anything like that and you’re using really simple art, then make sure that the writing is good! If the writing is good and interesting enough, it’ll distract people from your simple illustrations.

The only reason that you’ll probably get “I could have done better than that!” comments is if the main focus of your book or comic is on the simple art. But if your simple art is just there to accompany, illustrate or enhance the writing then people are much less likely to criticise it.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂