Vanilla Vs Rocky Road

Mike Choi is a great illustrator and Marvel artist, whose "style" I have always appreciated and thought simply beautiful. However, Mike has a different view on the matter:

"I'm still at the point where I see my development as an artist basically coming down to honing my ability to see and correct what is wrong.

Which is why I don't think I have a style yet. I think development of aesthetic style is the next step, when you purposefully add stuff to your work that you think is RIGHT, on top of the stuff that is simply correct."

But he DOES, have a style. Or perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way. Is the way someone draw, just that...and not their ultimate style. Hmm. Some samples of Mike's great work.





"I have a vanilla ice cream vs. rocky road ice cream analogy to describe my approach to art. Basically, my analogy is that everybody likes vanilla ice cream. But no one LOVES it (yes, generalisations all around.) But in order to get to the flavors that people LOVE, you need to start adding elements to it to cater to people's finer tastes (like chocolate, almonds, and marshmallows.) But the more you deviate from vanilla, the more people's tastes you deviate from, so as you add people who go from simply liking your work to loving it, you also get more people who go from liking or being ambivalent about your work to liking it less or even hating it.

Right now, my approach is simply to make the best vanilla ice cream I can. But I've started to look at some of the flavors I could add, and these are all flavors I like, and hopefully a lot of my current fans will too.

Ooh! Coconut!"


This is something that came up in my presentation feedback. Do I need to develop a style? no, not really. There's no reason to add a little bit of myself into my work, everybody does, but I don't need to put myself in a corner. I don't just want to attract the coconut lovers to my work.