Most Marketable Art Styles:

Let ‘s talk about art styles. This is not about personal style but mainstream marketable styles that already have a demand. As a new artist coming up and trying to land work, you need to understand what is already in demand. In this post, I will cover two main styles that have a large market demand. One is a photoreal style and the second is an illustrative style. 

Photo-real Style:

There are many nuances within each categories. But in general, a photoreal style is concept design represented in a photorealist way where the objective to convey the concept in a realistic style like a photograph. Typically, the style will echo the final product. For example, in film, photoreal concept art is today standard because the final product is a film that is shot in camera and in real locations. Photoreal concept art is use to establish the lighting, colors, mood and narrative of the scene in which will be passed down the vfx pipeline for further refinement. In video game, this is also becoming a norm as well as graphic technology gets better. 

Illustrative Style:

The other common style is the more illustrative style that has a more fluid and hand drawn/painted look. This style stemmed from traditional animation during the early Disney era and is now also adopted for the modern 3d animation film like Pixar ‘s Toy Story 4 and Frozen during development phase of a project. In the early days of animation where digital tools were non existent, the tool of trade to create the each animation frames were with traditional tools like pencil, ink pen and paint which is why the final product had a hand drawn look. 

The illustrative approach is a common and accepted approach for designing for animation film is because it is still the most efficient ways to flush out stylized stories. During the development phase, artists use tradition drawing fundamentals like perspective sketching and shading to quickly convey ideas and then employ digital painting in softwares like Photoshop to add colors, lighting and mood for polishing key frames. Key frames are important moments in the narrative that are flush out for further development. 

The easiest way to get work is do work in styles that already have a high demand. It is important to be familiar with both styles or commit to one style and be very good at it.