(Get ready for a spew of words, guys!)
So, I had a weird little moment a few weeks ago. I looked at my degree, I looked at my body of student-work... Then I looked at all the art I've done in my own personal time for the past seven years and realized, "WELL, that's DUMB I'm not using ANY OF THE TECHNIQUES I PAID MONEY TO LEARN!!!"

Of course that's a very broad over-statement because I'm constantly using techniques I learned for sighting, for rendering, for sketching... Pretty much for everything. But when it comes down to it my teachers all taught me how to work from the Classical era on up to Postmodernism, but nothing much else. In fact, most of my teachers have a problem with fantasy art in general, with comic book art, and with furry art in particular.

So I realized all these things and I was like.... GODDAMMIT I'M GONNA MAKE MY OWN STUPID ART STYLE.

So I call this art style "Postmodern Neoclassical FurRealism". Which is probably already a name for something, but fuck it. I'm making a point here.

Why is it that furry art is only divided into "toony" and "realistic"? WHY, GUYS?

Probably part of it is because just like me, a lot of furry artists have felt ostracized from the other art-communities in general. When you have a professor or art-critique tell you, "Oh this would be a beautiful drawing if it were of a human, but it's of an animal-person so it isn't really art" you start to feel kind of marginalized. Which is kind of what furry art is all about in the end, right? A community of people who felt marginalized for one reason or another banding together under a common, also marginalized, banner of animal people.

So that's the "toony" side of furry-art.

Then you have the furry artists who were always interested in other forms of artwork, and developed their work in that manner. They still may have been hounded for sketching an "animal person" every once in a while, but for the most part they saw their traditional work as a means to an end. They like drawing animal people because they also like drawing people and animals. It's a natural combination. They're still sometimes marginalized, though, for the same reason. "Oh that would be a beautiful painting except you put a tiger-man in it. So it's not that good of a painting now."

Of course once someone feels persecuted they're going to try and act as little like their prosecutors as possible. Which is probably why we don't have a lot of Neoclassical, or Futurist, or Cubist, or anything else furs. (Also imagining furries' proclivity toward porn I think that restricts a lot of the art into the "toony" or "realistic" styles - but that's another rant for another day.)

So, off that rabbit-trail we come back to me. I'm somewhere in the middle. I like drawing "cartoony" furs every once in a while. I also like drawing humans and animals separately. However much as I like new, "cartoony" ways of illustrating things, I'm also very attracted to the older, time-tested ways of doing anything in art. Sit me down in an art museum and I'll spend all day in the halls containing art from the Renaissance, Romantic, and Baroque periods (this is no exaggeration.)

So here I am, all miffed that I spent all this money on a degree that I'm just barely using. Hell, I don't even sketch the same way I did in my drawing classes because, as a furry-artist, people expect me to outline things, to use "cel-shading", to blah blah blah blah.

And my brain kind of snapped a little.

So I opened up Photoshop and I was like, SEURAT LEND ME YOUR RENDERING POWERS. People know Seurat for his pointilism work, but not for his equally-elegant work as a draftsman. When he worked with pencil and charcoal his work became about the shapes of light and dark against each other. He would always transpose the darkest shades on his figures over the lightest highlights in the background to keep everything interesting.

What was cool is I sketched in Photoshop like I was using charcoal again. That was refreshing.

Then I looked at the sketch and I was like, huh... this kinda looks like a grisaille underpainting. And then I said to myself, "Well, why the hell not!"

Y'see, a lot of the old masters of painting would start their paintings with a gray-scale underpainting and then glaze on layers of color. This was called working "in grisaille", hence the title of the piece. This allowed them to focus first on the play of light and shadow, and then later on the local-colors on the figures. I don't see why I couldn't use that technique, but in Photoshop where I can utilize actual LAYERS.

So we come back to the style I said this "painting" was in. It's "Postmodern" because it is. I created this in the Postmodern era (which makes me wonder what art historians are going to call the era after this. Post-postmodern?) It's "Neoclassicism" because I use old techniques in new ways, and new techniques in old ways; it's a perfect merger. Finally, "FurRealism" is a play on "Surrealism" - while surrealism sometimes looks like it's rendered in such a way as to be "realistic" (sometimes not, though...) the subject matter is always weird and abstract like it's from a dream. I call this "FurRealism" because, like Surrealism, I rendered this in such a way that it looks like it could be of a real thing, but it's actually of a furry-thing.

So there we go. That right there is why you shouldn't take art school too seriously XD

Honestly, though, I really, really, REALLY like this way of working. It came very naturally to me, and it felt like "my style". It's the very first time I've worked on something and I didn't feel like I was trying to "be" anyone - I was just using all the techniques I knew how to, and using them well. Sure, I was still inspired by some long-dead artists, but I was doing this art like I do art.

So I'm going to start honing my skills in this style. I know in the end people are just going to call it "realistic", but I honestly don't care. I'm just floored that I finally figured out how to do things in a way that's pleasing to me.

Adobe Photoshop 7
approximately 14 hours