Curious Cat 10

::Edit:: Readded the second image. Wasn't displaying for some reason.

Thank you so much for this great question! My style has a few influences. You'll notice the way I draw characters often changes over time, as well as the level of detail. This is because I try to blend a lot of emotions into one. Sometimes I need the heavy elements of shadows and anatomy. Sometimes I need toony and simplified expressions and faces to make more appealing and "feeling" characters. One of my favorite artists and most significant influences is the late James  'Jim' M. Hardiman. Imo one of the greatest anthro artists of all time. While our styles don't look the same, I think he effortlessly captures the elements I named above.

I've followed his work since I was 12 (I'm now 30), and I'm sad a lot of it is lost probably forever. In fact, He's probably also responsible for me falling into NSFW art. I would just try to look at his cute animal drawings about skunks, rabbits, and dragons as a kid. Occasionally I drifted into his darker horror-themed comics. Still, I accidentally stumbled upon his terribly gritty, detailed, and slick genitals he would draw, slapped onto these characters. Needless to say, his stuff was very shocking to me, and I LOVED it. Don't get me started on his graphic facial expressions, which some would consider "ugly."

I have other influences like Cory Loftis, Dyna, and Marco Bucci. They aren't really NSFW artists, though (With the occasional exception for Dyna). And while she's not an artist, I used to love the edgy and disturbing style of DickBitchMolly (Plus, she's a black poodle = > How dope!), but I don't know what happened to her. You can likely see my influence from these guys if you check out their pages. There are far more artists I adore who are mutuals, but I try not to bite their style. It's common for me to also reference Akira and Studio Gibli cels to draw certain expressions and effects (steam, smoke, liquid).

As pretentious as it may sound, I listen to a lot of music when drawing, so some of my influence comes from trying to put a particular sound to paper.

Aside from James's influence, I'm not trying to do what other artists are. I'm really just trying to do my own thing, which I discovered over time. Overall, I want my art to have this disgusting and dark feel of old pc games or vintage magazine art. I try for ugly, dark, sharp, clashing colors. Think of an organized mess. I also try to make it easy to do quickly and edit in case of mistakes. But I do try to imitate small things I like from other artists. Just small things that I feel aren't focused on enough. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is just not convenient to keep recreating. My process is essentially going from a rough sketch to painting and blocking out colors. I usually start monochromatic and add colors later. I use myself as a reference for some pictures to get the lighting right, so some images have similar lighting. Reference is soooo essential and overlooked. Sometimes I guess where lighting goes, but if I'm not confident, some 3D tools can help, or I just use my cellphone light and a prop (See the second image). At the very end, filters are added to give it a gritty pixelated look. I used to do this manually with a binary brush, but now I just use that to get fine details and highlights. I can make a tutorial of my process as a future Patreon goal. Which part would you like to see most? =) Thank you again!