#159 - The Meta Way To Copy Artists You Admire - Do Not Copy Their Work, But The WAY They Work
What you actually do need to copy from other artists you admire. 
used to keep trying to work on finished pieces. I always got stuck. Not satisfied with where it was going, I’d abandon it. It was not a satisfying experience. Then, one day, I realized that you don’t necessarily have to work toward a ’finished piece.’ I figured that out when looking at the ‘finished piece’ output of people like Kim Jung Gi and Terada Katsuya: they just draw whatever they want every minute of the day. Then, someone makes a selection of their art, puts it into a beautiful book, and publishes it.
These books are stunning, and they are all it has to be.
I had been contemplating making comics for a long time, and for a while, I also considered making cartoon adaptations of theater plays. Recently, I ran into Jules Feiffer’s work, and he does just that! His comic strips are short theater plays! Could I adapt theater plays in a similar way? I accidentally got that ‘making finished pieces’ hat on again. I read all the interviews I could find, listened to all his YouTube interviews, and bought a book about his life.
And this is what I learned: he is incredibly prolific. He can draw very fast, directly in pen. Loose, ‘funny’ lines. He never took the time to learn to draw the academic way because it was not fun for him. He puts fun first.
(open ArtPodPlay in separate page)
Also, he wrote lots of theater plays and even some screenplays that got turned into movies!
Then it dawned on me: the brilliance of his work is that he is incredible with dialogue. He knows that and enjoys writing dialogue more than anything else, so he focused on that. He built his work, his legacy around that.
Copying how he works would mean focusing on the things you find fun and are good at and building around that, entering different creative fields, and sailing on the coattails of that skill you have that you are incredibly good at. ‘Doing what he does’ doesn’t mean copying his art style, it means building around things you are naturally good at and enjoy doing.
I copy my favorite artists’ art or style, but I also find it helpful to figure out their approach to things, translate it to my situation, and copy that.