For my free inquiry project I’ll be studying how to draw in the styles of many different artists. For today’s inquiry, I looked at the works of Shiyoon Kim, a famous character designer who has worked on many animated films from Disney, Dreamworks, and Netflix. All the pictures here (unless said to be mine) are from Shiyoon Kim, and you can check out his personal website here:
http://www.shiyoonkim.com
Why Shiyoon?
Shiyoon’s work has always stood out to me for its more loose, speedy style of drawing. As someone who can take days working on a drawing, I really wanted to become comfortable with a more loose style!
Shiyoon also has an incredible sense of scale and proportion, as seen in his work. While I mostly did headshots for this study, I hope to one day also have a great sense of 3d!
Tools I Used:
While Shiyoon Kim has his brushes available to purchase, I am very broke and was able to find a similar brush on the Clip Studio Paint store.
One of the defining features of this style of brush is its varying line width. Shiyoon uses a combination of thick and thin brush strokes in order to add more visual interest, as well as emphasize the separation between something.
In this concept art he did for Big Hero 6, we can see the thin lines used in the hair, where the strokes are part of a single “body,” and thicker lines at the collar and base of chin, where clear separation is important.
In this concept art done for Raya, we can see Shiyoon use very wispy, scribble lines for hair. Using this example and the above one for reference, I gave it my first go!
This is my first attempt, and while similar enough in vibe still feels a bit stiff around the face. I do think the jacket is closer to the desired looseness though!
I also tried adding some simple greyscale, similar to Shiyoon’s Across the Spiderverse concept art. I like how the vertical stripes came out!
This was my second attempt! I tried adding more texture on the face by using a large pencil brush , and also used that same brush to create a wispy hair look.
this art from Shiyoon has a really cool use of solid black lighting, so I tried adding that to the work above!
awww yeah it’s all coming together 😎😎
Adding the solid shades really makes the piece come together!
For my final try, I referenced this Shiyoon Kim drawing:
this one, while much neater, still has some of that trademark looseness, as seen with how the lines intercept at the corners. I wanted to try copying how he drew eyes here!
And here’s the final try! This was a super fun style to experiment with, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot. While obviously not 100 percent accurate, I think these pieces look very unique compared to anything I’ve made before!
