Why It’s Important You Find Your Art Inspirations

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I find it telling when someone shares their inspirations, and the art is… less than great. Artists should be careful about who they study, in case they pick up mistakes and bad art fundamentals. It’s especially common in NSFW.

Finding people you look up to is an important part of becoming a better artist. After all, you’re only as good as you can imagine yourself to be.

Finding good art inspirations is an important part of becoming a better artist. Click To Tweet

Here’s why you should start investing time in looking for (and updating) your art inspirations.

Table of Contents hide

1 Set a higher bar for yourself

2 Learn techniques and problem solving

3 See how the field is moving

3.1 Related

Set a higher bar for yourself

Your inspirations show you your potential future, giving you something to aim at.

One of my favorite artists is Ookuma Nekosuke. Why do I consider him an artist worth studying?

Highly rendered works, with lots of stylistic choices to learn from
Does professional work for Nitroplus
Has a solid grasp on art fundamentals
Really cute girls

I’ll show you later how I steal his techniques to make better art. In the mean time, here are other examples of how inspirations can push you to make better works.

West Studio’s concept art showed me what level of polish to strive for in my character design class.

Gats‘s stories inspired me to create content around my OCs

What if your inspirations are too far away?
Some artists can find themselves discouraged when they see how accomplished their inspirations are. Seeing good art becomes demoralizing, rather than motivating.

It takes a big mindset shift to overcome this. Instead of focusing on how good you currently are in relation to your inspirations, focus on improving relative to yourself yesterday. Having inspirations is like following a north star. You can use it to guide your studies and artistic direction, but you need to accept that you won’t be them.

Learn techniques and problem solving

The artists you look up to will all have their own workflows and techniques, which you can ‘steal’ to make your own art better.

It might be the way artist A proportions their bodies. Or how artist B makes characters pop with warm and cool lighting.

Studying the design decisions your inspirations make teaches you more about your tastes, and helps you hone in on your style.

I’ve used some of Ookuma Nekosuke’s works as close references, both in style choices and level of polish.

Their approach to leg and breasts shading was particularly helpful here

Newer artists hesitate to copy techniques, thinking it’s not “original”. That mindset closes you off to new possibilities for your art. It is not the techniques that are original (even your inspirations were inspired by someone), but how the artist combines different techniques into something unique.

Assessing your inspirations
As you improve, you’ll find your tastes and art senses change. You might need to drop some artists you looked up to, after you see their art isn’t as good as you thought it was. I see a lot of artists stagnate because their inspirations have nice art, but not good art fundamentals. By proxy, they learn the wrong things.

An old image in my favorites folder. It might’ve looked good to me before, when I was unaware of the anatomy mistakes.

See how the field is moving

Just like any other industry, the NSFW field is always changing. Trends arise, rules change, and limits are overcome.

Following relevant artists give you a glimpse into what’s possible, challenging your perspectives and self-imposed limits

We all view the world in different ways influenced by our experiences and beliefs. Some may be positive: “I’m confident in my ability to deliver quality art”, while others can be negative: “I’m too shit an artist to start commissions”.

Sometimes, these beliefs become so strong, we find ourselves ignoring evidence that the opposite is true. In other words, we become trapped.

Handpicked for you: Are you sabotaging yourself? Here are 4 self-doubt traps artists face.

For the longest time, I believed I couldn’t mix NSFW and SFW. My friends would be weirded out if they saw my art. I would lose out on employment opportunities. Potential partners would be disgusted if they found out.

It’s a long story, but eventually I started to be more open about my NSFW. One big inspiration was Reiq. He’s a big name in hentai (OG artist of Jiggly Girls), while also having a successful SFW career. He’s worked with Wacom, Brainstorm School, and DC comics.