Greetings Artisan!

Artists frequently get told that they need to learn highly detailed rendering.

Often the goal is fully realistic anatomy, rendered with perfect lighting and detail...

And while this works for some...

The reality is many artists are actually aspiring to create simpler artwork with cartoony style.
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​I don't know about you... but for me this was a major part of my artistic journey.

I spent a lot of time learning to render. I also spent a lot of time teaching people rendering and shading...

When I create concept design for video games, I need to make sure I'm describing the form, pushing all of the dimensionality I can, making it shiny, adding texture.

Like this...

But I also found that other artists were getting way more done with less.

Especially when it came to comics or projects where speed was important...

This became a bit of an obsession of mine. I spent decades learning to render properly, but I often found that some of my favourite art was dead simple.

Minimal shading. Simple line work.

I was attracted to the work of Hergé and Uderzo on Tintin and Asterix early on. Obviously the work of Moebius was a huge influence on me in many ways. I was drawn to a lot of the other places where you'd see really simple flat colour styles... Alphonse Mucha, classic old comic book strips, pulp fiction.

A lot of the animation that I watched growing up was just simple flat colour. And it worked really, really well.

It took me a long time to figure out how to actually put this into practice, and it's one of the key things that I teach inside the Line and Colour Academy.
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But the pull of shiny rendering is strong!

Every now and then I get enamoured again with the draw of rendering and shininess.

It's really fun to add dimensionality to things. I dream of creating graphic novel projects that are meticulously detailed with a sense of lighting and shading.

But whenever I need to re-inspire myself as to why flat colour is so effective... I have a collection of art books that always do the trick.

I made a video about this - flipping through some of these books and talking about why simple line and colour works so well:

You can Check it Out Here:

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In it I look at four artists who each taught me something different about flat colour:

• Yoshikawa (Breath of Fire): flat colour forces you to leverage the drawing. If the design is good, the image works. Nothing to hide behind.

• Akiman (Turn A Gundam): the answer to "I need more rendering" is always "I need better design." Better colours, more research, more simplification.

• Krassinsky (Franco-Belgian comics, colored by Laetitia Schwendimann): depth comes from composition, not rendering. Foreground, middle ground, background. That's what makes simple panels feel cinematic.

• Moebius: his secret weapon is the ground plane. He always shows where characters stand relative to a surface, and it gives flat images a sense of real, traversable space.

Flat colour was something that was missing from my skill set for a long time. And if it's something you've been wanting to explore, hopefully you can get some inspiration from these books and this video.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

-Tim

PS: I've got some information coming up about the Line and Colour Academy. As I mentioned in the last email, the price is going up at the end of the month. I'm currently rebuilding the sales page and getting things sorted. I recently added a new Pinocchio comic page tutorial, and I'm going to add more this week.
If you're interested, I'll send an email really soon with some extra info on what I have planned for LCA in 2026.
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​PPS: (A few people have asked via email... about course updates, All new tutorials and upgrades to LCA are free, as I add new things you get access to them, even if you purchased the course 4 years ago)

PPPS: I also have some other new things coming very soon. I'm launching a new community tier... and I'm going to be running another round of the Line and Colour Intensive sometime in March. Stay tuned for all of that.
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phew...