A Distant Star

I'm starting to wonder just how much choice artists really have when it comes to the techniques they use because not only are we limited by the means, the methods, and the medium we use, but also the time and the places in which we work. For instance when you look back at any comic that was being produced in the seventies the limited color palette they worked with is wholly their own, but now that most coloring is done digitally, its possible to produce almost any look and feel we can imagine in any color we so desire. This of course leads to the burden of choice as well as several other issues to be resolved as digital coloring has some bizzare personality quirks that trend towards a high gloss plastic look, over saturated hues, chroma heavy gradients, and subfusc lighting that makes me wonder if someone just slapped color over photogrammetry or vector map. All of which basically says that I'm in that weird intergenerational gap that grew up watching things like traditional hand drawn animation and matte painting give way to photoshop and whatever 3-D modelling software it is that people use. Granted I started off learning to draw with a pencil and paper, but when it comes to working on a comic it's almost entirely digital so my aesthetic sense of art is a bit skewed at the moment between loving the look and feel of all the things that I grew up with, and trying to figure out where all of those things fit in the current world of digital art. All of which can be seen evidenced in my attempt to draw comics as the sheer number of things that have to be taken into consideration add up to dozens of different possible tweaks that all influence the overall look and feel. Trying to break them down into their respective schools of thought of course is currently driving me up a wall as even if I can identify the conscious and unconscious biases behind each, figuring out what they're actually called and how to reproduce them is an entirely different story.