Style from limitation
If you're on this website and you're not someone I personally speak to, I'd wager there's a good chance you got here from seeing my artwork that I post in various places.
I have been drawing all my life but it was not until December of 2021 that I decided to download digital art software and give it a shot. I had never considered myself good or even decent at drawing at any point prior to this and it was more of an act of boredom than anything serious or focused.
Now, nearly a year later, I regard making art as my only real hobby. (I do not count gaming or movies or anything like this as a "hobby", as these are purely consuming a product and not producing something with your creativity.)
I did not take digital art in a serious manner at first because, as an outsider and inexperienced, it seems like an astronomical learning curve and I lacked any and all typical tools used in creating digital art. No tablet, no professional camera for photography, not even a capable phone for using as a pseudo-art-tablet.
This was the first piece of digital art I had created, drawn with a mouse. It is of the character Pandemonica from the video game Helltaker. It's shaky. It's not really shaded. Her facial features are not great. However, this was enough to convince myself that digital art was possible to do with a mouse and with no typical digital art tools.
This is where my philosophy of "style from limitation" comes from. I can not reproduce the same clean lines that someone with a tablet and stylus can. It's very difficult to reproduce the look of pressure-drawing with a mouse.
My style of charcoal comes from these limitations. Charcoal is meant to be dirty and chaotic. It's not meant to be used for drawing clean lines and defined shapes. It's a style of drawing impression rather than definition. With these concepts in mind, I picked up the charcoal brushes in my software and began creating.
Here is a charcoal piece made pretty early on. This is of the character Justice, also from the video game Helltaker. There is a significant difference between this and the previous piece. It's still drawn with a mouse, but the primary focus by this point was to draw no solid lines. No hard lines to define the shape of the face, clothes, or hair. Charcoal is great at this and does most of the work for you, and you end up with a soft fuzzy lighting effect which I think looks very nice. These effects are easily reproducable with a mouse.