EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/5j9hj.png)
[One of my new paintings, a landscape]
I've become fascinated by how I can improve myself as an artist. I really love life drawing and trying to capture a moment, or a person's likeness, but I really want to develop the sort of concept art finish that I really admire from Zero Cartin, or the style that I love to see from fishuu. Taking my cue from learning Starcraft I've been looking at the pros for tips. One really skilled pro-artist I really admire, who lead a fascinating life, is Louis Wain.
Louis Wain was a British artist who lived between 1860 and 1939, whose preferred subject was cats. He had a lovely illustrative style and distinct cartoonish cats, which he started drawing to cheer up his ailing wife, who unfortunately passed away soon after (of unrelated breast cancer, the cat drawings are excellent and not at all lethal).
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[A Louis Wain Cat, accept no substitute]
Wain became incredibly popular for his cat images, which I really like because of his use of line. I tend to see shading and light when I draw, which is very valuable for painting but not illustration.The thing is, Wain wasn't always so stylised in his work, in his early career his work looked more like something I could relate to:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/BzJaC.jpg)
[His early more realist cat style]
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[I've recently started drawing women, it's going ok]
As you can see I don't compare, but I'm on the same path, and it's good to know I can expand my skill set in that direction.I've never really been able to draw without shading, lineart is an impossibility for me, so I've been trying to learn from his approach. This means entirely abandoning the way I render and working from the ground up. I'm not jumping right in with cats, but it's been interesting, which is to say;
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/leabq.png)
[I have not been quick to learn]
I'd be terrified of being set in my ways. Wain's story sadly does not end with the huge popularity of his work, which extended to greetings cards and a book and let him fund animal charities.
Wain suffered a breakdown after World War 1 and became impoverished and schizophrenic at 57. This left him in the pauper's wing of an asylum, but he continued to paint. The progression of his style now appears in psychology textbooks
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[The progression is profound and bizarre, but represents such an interesting exploration of abstract cats.]
Wain's later cats are bizarre but such bold images I'm really intrigued, because I could never be so abstract, but I wish I could. I stand in envy of his talent even as he suffered such mental torment.A fund was set up for him by fans of his work, notably H.G. Wells, which allowed him the comfort of better asylums and to continue his work until his death in 1939.
"He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves." - H.G. Wells
Oh, some had asked, so I made a shirt out of the subject of my last blog:
The shirt is available on Redbubble if you're interested
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/lTZhQ.jpg)
