How would you describe this art style?

January 20, 2020 9:40 AM

Last year, Tumblr and Instagram introduced me to Homestuck, Hiveswap, Hazbin Hotel, Pesterquest, and Sanders Sides. I have questions.

I will be frank: I am not a fan of these comics/shows/etc and find the fanart for each especially off-putting. I would like to get a better sense of how to describe the art style used in both official and fan content (there seems to be a lot of crossover.) Where did it come from? What is it based on? Are there other offshoots I should be aware of so I can pre-emptively filter them from Tumblr and Instagram? Thank you, and apologies to those who really like these respective fandoms -- they just aren't for me.

posted by Kitchen Witch to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

I don't know if there's going to be a good tag/descriptor for the art style (other than the names of the projects themselves.) From what I've seen it just seems to be a fairly flat, (deliberately?) naive western cartoon style. Less a stylized "kid with crayon" vibe than Hyperbole and a Half but similarly going for a "kids with colored pencils" level of sophistication. It was apparently super-great for encouraging a ton of fanart/collaboration/exploration with the space, but yeah, it's not an easy aesthetic to love for me either.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:25 AM on January 20, 2020 [2 favorites]

Looks like varying levels of chibi and anime influence to me.
posted by See you tomorrow, saguaro at 11:30 AM on January 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm only familiar with Homestuck; while the others seen pretty disparate in style, they all seem to draw from the aesthetics of tween media from the early 2000s: MSPaint doodling, Flash animations from Newgrounds, point-and-click adventure games, Cartoon Network TV shows, Japanese visual novels. Younger millennials colorfully rebooting their own nostalgia about digital media for a Gen Z audience. If there's a catchy keyword describing all of that, I'm not sure what it is.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:06 PM on January 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

Oddly enough, most artists don't wake up and say "I'm going to create this genre of art today", so they end up creating art that doesn't fall neatly into an identifiable visual style. At best, I think you could make an argument for something like "pop art", but that's a genre so wide as to be basically meaningless from an aesthetic standpoint. Or as others including yourself have done you can kinda group it with other similar pieces to get the idea across, but it's not perfect.

All this to say, I don't think you're going to find a tag to filter, my dude. (Also, that would depend on people consistently using that tag, which, heh, good luck anyway.)
posted by Aleyn at 3:55 PM on January 20, 2020 [3 favorites]

It's just a western bastardization of chibi style anime : big heads, small bodies, big eyes. Andrew Hussie is the creator of the style, and all offshoot of that. I would also describe it as amateur, but since it is so unique i don't think there's any other media with the same style that doesn't have Hussie's name on it. there's a lot of stylistic choices lifted from cartoons like family guy, hands and pants and the like.
posted by FirstMateKate at 9:22 AM on January 21, 2020

Hazbin feels like it owes a ton to Extreme Nineties Cartoons, there's an "I love flat Ed Benedict designs but I also want everything to be kind of edgy" feel that tells me its creator probably loved Ren and Stimpy. I could only watch like five minutes of that thing before I turned it off, it sure is not for me.

Hiveswap and Pesterquest are explicitly extending Homestuck and working in the design space set out by that.

I've never heard of Sanders Sides but a cursory image search sure makes it look like the work of someone who's grown up on a ton of anime and manga.

There's not really any single design thread running through these to my pro artist eyes, to be honest. Sorry. Block 'em individually.
posted by egypturnash at 9:44 PM on January 21, 2020